Utility Fog

Sunday, 21st of April, 2024

Another week filled with everything from warped pop to complex beats, granular sound destruction to delicate acoustic recordings.

LISTEN AGAIN and take notes this time (just kidding, the notes are all here)! Stream on demand from FBi, podcast right here.

claire rousay - 4pm [Thrill Jockey/Bandcamp]
claire rousay - it could be anything [Thrill Jockey/Bandcamp]
When I first heard of claire rousay, she was described as a "percussionist", and that's something I've had to unravel from my brain over the intervening years, as her music has tended to be brilliant minimalist constructions of slice-of-life conversations, found-sound and field recordings, and unexpected arrangements of classical instruments and electronics. But she was indeed a drummer in math rock and punk bands either before, during or after leaving the Evangelical Christian systems she grew up in. The first claire rousay recordings date from 2019, when she came out as transgender. There is (free jazz style) percussion, but as much silence as playing. It's not long until she's making artfully constructed collages of field recordings, ambient soundscapes, and words - words that would be heard via primitive text-to-speech programs, and later sung through harshly-set autotune. There's always been a confessional nature to these words, touching on mental health, sex and gender among other things, but at a careful remove. Even so, the text that begins the album ("4pm"), read by fellow sound-artist Theodore Cale Schafer is particularly wrenching - and it's immediately interrupted by a growing drone, that itself then morphs into the first song on the album. And yes, sentiment is an album of songs, sung through that autotune, accompanied by mournful major-key guitar, various strings and other instruments. There are strong vibes of Dntel circa Life Is Full Of Possibilities to me, which is totally welcome. Touching stuff, rightly being heralded as the next breakthrough for rousay.

BIG|BRAVE - chanson pour mon ombre [Thrill Jockey/Bandcamp]
BIG|BRAVE - quotidian : solemnity [Thrill Jockey/Bandcamp]
Also out this week on Thrill Jockey is the incredible, perhaps career best, new album A Chaos Of Flowers from Canada's BIG|BRAVE. Through the last few albums, vocalist & guitarist Robin Wattie has harnessed the words of others to express herself through BIG|BRAVE's music - from the poetry of Alexander Cree speaking of being mixed race to the repurposed folks songs on their collaboration with the body - and here she's drawing from the poetry of women, remarking that most well-known folk and traditional poetry is written by men. So "chanson pour mon ombre" (song for my shadow) is by 19th century poet Renée Vivien. Musically the folk turn of the body collaboration and to some extent also heard in last year's Nature Morte is even more emphasised here, offset by the crushing heaviness Seth Manchester of Machines With Magnets always provides. Like the last albums of the beloved Low, the juxtaposition of Wattie's emotive voice, the folky sweetness and the enveloping storms of distortion has a deep emotional impact. Tremendous.

Alex Sopp - Bougainvillea [New Amsterdam Records/Bandcamp]
New York's yMusic Ensemble are a classical chamber group who've collaborated across the spectrum with pop & indie artists like Ben Folds and My Brightest Diamond, and commissioned & performed works by many contemporary composers as well as the likes of MBD's Shara Nova, and Sufjan Stevens. They also perform music they've composed themselves, and so the prospect of one member's solo album - Alex Sopp is yMusic's flautist - is intriguing. Sopp sings as well as playing flutes, whistles and keyboards, and the album is co-produced by Thomas Bartlett aka Doveman. Sopp's songwriting style is strongly heard through songs that vary from more electronic to more classically orchestrated - occasionally sounding a little "Broadway musical", but also the baroque indie style of Sufjan or Shara, and especially Julia Holter. These are enjoyable songs enhanced by creative arrangements and production.

Amatorski - Welcome [Crammed Discs/Bandcamp]
Inne Eysermans, founder and multi-instrumentalist behind Belgian band Amatorski, if affected by unilateral deafness, meaning that she's never been able to experience sound in stereo. After a few years' break, her band is back with a collection of great songs, Curves and Bends, Things Veer, and this time round Eysermans decided to lean into her own experience, and mix the album in mono. For this she worked with the brilliant Yves de Mey, and they produced something that sounds rich even with the reduced soundstage (for two-eared normies at least!) Lyrically the songs the dance around ideas from ecological philosopher Timother Morton, ideas about the relationship between humans and nature and technology, and the band mix field recordings in amongst the instrumentation. There's something refreshingly new about the approach taken here.

Travis Cook - empowering bright futures [Travis Cook Bandcamp]
Now that Travis Cook and Marcus Whale have brought the Collarbones era to a close, these occasional single tracks that Travis puts up on his Bandcamp are the only way we'll hear new music from him (I think!) for now. This one's quite dark, with some beats that clatter and skip almost like jungle but not quite...

µ-Ziq - Hyper Daddy (Single Mix) [Planet µ/Bandcamp]
Sometime last week I noticed Mike Paradinas foreshadowing something on Instagram. Maybe I hadn't been paying attention, or maybe the new µ-Ziq did creep up on us with little warning. I note that in a Planet µ email from March it's listed in the forthcoming section, but not before then. First single is "Hyper Daddy", which adapts some themes from 2022's "Uncle Daddy" from Magic Pony Ride into something more like a footwork-jungle hybrid. Mike's been thinking about the IDM of the '90s (and how nobody liked the term), and is reconstructing it from the ground up with the melodic nature of the music he & his cohorts made back then, but taking in dance styles from then through to contemporary times. Look, it's gonna be rad, count the days till June 14th!

Jesta - Liquor Snurf [Straight Up Breakbeat/Bandcamp]
The folks at Finnish drum'n'bass label Straight Up Breakbeat are always putting together new compilation series, and the latest is States of Art, four 12"s and then an extended digital compilation. For the first vinyl EP States of Art I I was instantly grabbed by the pre-release single from Jesta, one half of course of Gremlinz & Jesta. Punchy jungle-informed d'n'b, or is it the other way round? Dancefloor killa.

Yraki - Percolate [Early Reflex]
Mariano Sibilia is London-based, but was born in Italy, so it's nice to see his latest EP as Yraki coming out from Turin's Early Reflex label. And his deconstructed club sounds really suit the label, referencing grime and dubstep as well as techno, always with the bass weight. The title track starts with repetitive 4/4 drum machine beats, with a nicely reverbed synth-shriek, but then the kicks stutter and the closed hi-hats shift out of time, before a syncopated sub-bass re-grounds us. What's nice about this music is that it never settles on one thing, shifting into a halftime groove that's almost hip-hop, then reasserting the 4/4, then somewhere else.

3Phaz - Reset [CEE/Bandcamp]
One of Egypt's finest electronic producers, the apparently anonymous 3Phaz, appears here on Primary Forest 02, a compilation from the online-only Lapsus sublabel CEE. The Barcelona-based label seeks to interrogate the relationship between technology, nature, and art. This second Primary Forest comp has a well-curated group of artists from Egypt, UK, Spain and Italy, all working non-Eurocentric percussive and musical elements into their post-club forms. As usual, 3Phaz's track is dizzying.

Franck Vigroux - Jolin [Aesthetical]
Back on his own label Aesthetical after his second outing on raster-media, French electronic producer Franck Vigroux is in fine familiar form. Synths both analogue and digital course through the album, often surging into industrial beats.

Innode - Air Liquide [Editions Mego/Bandcamp]
From France to Austria, where Editions Mego was based, under the loving leadership of Peter Rehberg until his untimely death in 2021. Innode are a trio that certainly reside in the radius of Mego's influence: glitchy textures joined with postrock/krautrock momentum with synths rather than rock instruments. On drums is the great Steven Hess, a central member not only of black metal/drone/noise band Locrian but also minimalist electro-acoustic trio Haptic. Stefan Németh is best known as a member of the wonderful Radian whose music is probably the closest to what we find herein. And finally Bernhard Breuer, member of live techno band Elektro Guzzi and various rock and improv outfits. I really loved Innode's second album Syn, which came out on Editions Mego in 2021, and grain is similarly inclined, based around rhythms both glitchy and organic, created by layering different takes from the musicians on drums, percussion and electronics, and all held together with judicious synth work. If you like the postrock of Tortoise and their ilk, or moreso the European style from Kammerflimmer Kollektief, Radian, Trapist and so on, this should scratch that itch very comfortably.

Tim Koch - Shudder ROM (Shudder to Think Adrien75 Mix) [Tim Koch Bandcamp]
In July 2020, Adelaide's Tim Koch released Scordatura, the album that, more than any other, launched him from his IDM roots into new territories, with granular processing to the fore, of acoustic or electric instruments at least as much as purely electronic sound sources. It's a great album, that was (maybe still is?) available in a multitude of formats. Some years later he's bringing those works to our ears through the lens of various of his mates (not including me. I was just too slow. Sorry). It's all great, mostly of a piece with the original album. Another old IDM hand, Adrien75, preserves the glitchiness but corrals it into something resembling broken beats. Nhulunbuy, Arnhem Land-based Kris Keogh responded with his style of granular ambience, which he turned to some years back after his beginnings in breakcore, and of many other highlights I can recommend those of NZ's Jet Jaguar and Osaka-based Onkonomiyaki Labs (Ian Masters of Pale Saints, and more recently Tim's experimental electronic pop project Isolated Gate).

Xani - Unknown Area [Xani Bandcamp]
Since last year's An Inaccurate History of Electronic Dance Music, Naarm/Melbourne violinist Xani Kolac has been trickling out bits of her experimental pop & violin looping on her Bandcamp. Out now is a pair of tracks: Keep Moving/Unknown Area which showcase both of these. While her solo act mostly really is her absolutely solo, triggering electronic parts with her feet as well as looping her instrument and singing, here she's joined by drummer Justin Olsson, which immediately recalls her rock/folk/indie duo The Twoks from something like a decade ago, then with drummer Mike Leahy. The first track is a song about having too, well, keep moving even when the world is making you want to hide under a blanket (my interpretation). But the 8-minute second track is an instrumental improvisation that shows what Xani can do with her violin and live sampler/looper, with Olsson helping to propel it in a krautrocky way.

Laurent Pernice - La décision d'un homme [ADN/Bandcamp]
Laurent Pernice - Une fine poussière le recouvrait [ADN/Bandcamp]
Coming out of France's industrial scene in the '80s, Laurent Pernice has taken a number of left turns in his career, into ambient and techno, then quasi-jazz collages from which he has integrated more acoustic sounds, ending up with works composed for the stage, in collaboration with various musicians. On Antigone, written to accompany a setting of Sophocles' play by Anima Motrix, he's worked with violist Violaine Sultan to coax many sounds out of her viola, set in amongst delays and reverbs, as well as some lovely melodic passages accompanied by his basses or harp and zither - appropriately for an adaptation of an Ancient Greek play. Many of the tracks are short cues, but even they hold plenty of listening pleasure, and the album flows well without the theatrical and spoken elements.

Seabuckthorn - Serre Long [quiet details/Bandcamp]
Seabuckthorn - Sage Word [quiet details/Bandcamp]
From the beginning, English musician Andy Cartwright's music as Seabuckthorn has held a tension between his masterful folk guitar fingerpicking and his interest in extended approaches like bowed guitar and e-bows, shoegazey textures and field recordings. On this warm, this late, released by quiet details, all these elements are present along with previous collaborator Phil Cassel's double bass and trombone, which add an "ensemble" feel. It's not that Cartwright's very personal studio creations aren't wonderful, but there's something to be said for two musicians playing together.

J. Campbell - Parade At The Moorings [Nice Music/Bandcamp]
Newcastle musician Jason Campbell is best known for his uneasy industrial ambient as Stitched Vision and his industrial techno as Collector, but as "J. Campbell" he builds narrative works out of field recordings, industrial electronics and acoustic instruments such as piano. Erosion of Memory, released by iconic Naarm label Nice Music, reflects on family and the (post-)industrial lanscape of Newcastle. It's quite deeply affecting.

asher tuil - Opus VII [Room40/Bandcamp]
The latest album on Room40 (of many) from the resolutely lower-case asher tuil is a 75-minute work divided into 10 sections. All the music is made from three main elements: rhythmic sounds made from filtered noise, field recordings from his surrounds in Providence, Rhode Island, and a sequence of synth harmonies. As the full Opus unfolds, a sonic environment is revealed, sometimes more rhythmic, sometimes floating, while real-world sounds interject. The emergence of the passing truck or plane near the end of "Opus VII" demonstrates the artfulness with which tuil combines these elements, in a work that never gets boring in its hour and a quarter length.

Laurén Maria - Forms Emerge Anew and [The Collection Artaud]
Yu Miyashita's label The Collection Artaud is primarily an outlet for his own glitched electronica under his own name or as Yaporigami, but occasionally like-minded artists are hosted too. Here fellow Berlin resident Laurén Maria gives us two tracks of seemingly abstract electronics that hide within them processed voice and deconstructed club sounds. They're mastered by Miyashita and represent the high quality production of his label.

Langham Research Centre - Nachholbedürfnis (Beatriz Ferreyra Remix) [nonclassical/Bandcamp]
The idea of formidable musique concrète/acousmatic composer Beatriz Ferreyra doing a "remix" is both wonderfully bizarre and also not that far-fetched. At 87 years old, Ferreyra is not only being re-released and collected by various contemporary labels including Meanjin's Room40 but also still making music - and of course her music has always been about manipulating sounds. If she is to do a remix, who better than Langham Research Centre, the UK quartet who use original techniques and technology of those concrète pioneers, including several ¼" tape machines. Their Tape Works, Vol. 2 came out in 2021 from Nonclassical, four years after Vol. 1 - and Vol. 1 was remixed in 2018 by Jim O'Rourke and group A. It took a little longer this time, but now we have the two reworks here (the other is by modular synth maven Kara-Lis Coverdale). Of course Ferreyra's rework is no less astract than the original material, but full of colour and movement.

Olivia Block - Violet-Green [Black Truffle/Bandcamp]
Chicago sound-artist and composer Olivia Block has, since the late '90s, comfortably straddled the linkes between musique concrète, noise, and contemporary composition. Block has often been able to bring poignant emotion to her electroacoustic constructions, albeit in a different way from the deeply personal work of claire rousay with which we started tonight's show. But The Mountains Pass, her new album and first on Oren Ambarchi's Black Truffle, takes her work into the unfamiliar territory of song, incorporating Block's voice and lyrics for the first time, along with drums from the great Jon Mueller. Naturally, these songs are nevertheless somewhat abstracted, fragmentary things, appearing out of long electro-acoustic passages, where Block sings of endangered wolves and mysterious bird die-offs among cut-up piano, droning organs and trumpet. This is a stunning, beautiful album that you owe it to yourself to explore in full.

Listen again — ~209MB

Sunday, 14th of April, 2024

Vocals tonight used in myriad ways from glistening pop to visceral assaults...

LISTEN AGAIN, I know, there's a lot to take in! FBi's website offers stream on demand, or you can podcast here.

9T Antiope - Ready Player One [American Dreams/Bandcamp]
9T Antiope - Canvas Blank [American Dreams/Bandcamp]
Listeners of this show know I've been a fan of 9T Antiope for a long time. The duo of Sara Shamloo and Nima Aghiani are Paris-based Iranians, who also record as Taraamoon, in which Shamloo sings in Farsi - but for the more experimental 9T Antiope her songs are predominantly in English. Nima Aghiani's violin is a frequent presence alongside electronic noisemakers, but Shamloo's lush voice is often juxtaposed against harsh sounds, throbbing drones, digital glitches. Their new album Horror Vacui, out now through the excellent American Dreams (incidentally now based in Paris like 9T Antiope), is possibly their most accessble yet, though no less experimental for that. The "horror vacui" of the title is the fear of empty spaces, but also refers to the spaces in between - the in-betweenness of being expatriates from your country, neither here nor there. These fears, and the void itself, are welcomed in by Shamloo's voice and Aghiani's often rhythmic, looped violin, octave violin and octave mandolin. The crunchy string loops and warm vocals dispell any looming emptiness.

Aether + Vassallo - Desire [Aether + Vassallo Bandcamp]
Tonight we premiere a new song from Sydney duo Aether + Vassallo, from their forthcoming album Unbroken. Bronwyn Eather's poetry & vocals, plus keyboards & electronics, are supported by ethereal slide guitar from Paul Vassallo. Eather's songwriting and poetry emerged after a whole other life as a linguist, including a 10-year stint in Arnhem Land researching indigenous languages. On "Desire" the narrator takes us towards a gathering storm with eerie, ambient washes.

Oren Ambarchi, Johan Berthling, Andreas Werliin - tre [Drag City/Bandcamp]
The second album from the distinctive Australian guitarist Oren Ambarchi with Johan Berthling & Andreas Werliin (the rhythm section of Fire!) takes off where the last one left off - that is to say, it's more of the same, which is a really good thing! Berthling and Werliin dive right in with one of their trademark circular riffs of fat double bass and drums (no cymbals from what I can hear!) - jazz-indebted, rhythmically driving. Over this, Ambarchi patiently weaves his sounds, which rarely actually resemble guitar. Are those flute lines actually flute? Maybe. In any case, Ambarchi's own minimalist tendencies mesh perfectly with the two Swedes. Brilliant stuff as always!

Domenico Lancellotti - Abraço No Faust (Ricardo Dias Gomes remix) [Domenic Lancellotti Bandcamp/Ricardo Dias Gomes Bandcamp]
Ricardo Dias Gomes - Não Ver Onde Se Vê (Domenico Lancellotti & Eduardo Manso remix) [Domenic Lancellotti Bandcamp/Ricardo Dias Gomes Bandcamp]
Earlier this year, Brazilian musician Domenico Lancellotti released sramba, a modernised take on Brazilian samba, drawing in krautrock and electronica. And last year Ricardo Dias Gomes' Muito Sol grabbed our attention with brilliantly abstracted takes on Brazilian popular music. The two musicians are touring together, and have created a very limited edition cassette (and digital) EP in which they remix or rework each other's music. "Um abraço no Faust" was my favourite track from Lancellotti's album, a hypnotic groove with a seemingly simple guitar refrain with close harmonies that opens up at intervals with a gorgeous major-key change. Gomes is present on the original recording, but for his remix the guitar is replaced by ringing vibraphone. It's a beauty. For his part, Lancellotti works with Eduardo Manso to augment Gomes' songs, more radically on the other two tracks, but here scattering percussion in the choruses.

Banabila & Machinefabriek - A Giant Misstep [Banabila Bandcamp]
Since their self-titled debut 12 years ago, experienced Dutch musicians & sound-artists Michel Banabila and Rutger Zuydervelt (Machinefabriek) have had a fruitful partnership, clearly complementing each other. Banabila has four decades of experience working with all manner of instruments along with tape and electronics, while for at least 2 decades Zuydervelt has amassed a huge collection of works from sound-art and drone to soundtracks and many musical collaborations. A Looming Presence finds them working with more beats than usual, something Banabila is no stranger too, and which has crept into Zuydervelt's work more of late. But the rhythms weave around earthy textures, field recordings, drones, or even voice and viola. This "playful yet dark soundtrack for a crumbling world" is in fact rather comforting, compulsive listening.

Madeleine Cocolas - Drift [Room40/Bandcamp]
Brisbane composer Madeleine Cocolas's new album Bodies uses her synths and voice to explore the connection between bodies of water and human bodies. Whereas last year's Spectral used found sounds and electronics to evoke her surroundings, and various emotions - anxiety, release - Bodies is more flowing (watery) and embodied. On "Drift" her sampled voice joins pulsating synths, pushed onwards perhaps by river currents.

Avalanche Kaito - Donle [Glitterbeat/Bandcamp]
In 2022, the debut EP and then album from Avalanche Kaito were a revelation. Labalou Kaito Winse, an urban griot from Burkina Faso, met noise/post-punk duo of Benjamin Chaval on drums & electronics and Nico Gitto on guitar when he first visited Brussels. Something about their approach to music & sound gelled, and if anything on Talitakum they're even more of a singular unit. Whether Kaito is providing wild vocals, or his Peul flute and mouth bow, these songs are dizzyingly inventive, rhythmically complex and sonically dense.

Axon Breeze - Click [Axon Breeze Bandcamp]
nipaluna/Hobart musician, director and curator J R Brennan is the founder of KIN, an organisation that works on arts projects with people who have experience with the criminal justice system, and is also Co-director of Special Events at MONA. The first track from his "death metal club music" project Axon Breeze, "YOU SNAKE" appeared two years ago, and it's only taken that long for him to release "Click". The death metal part is mostly confined to Brennan's vocals, which growl hoarsely but not unintelligbly, but also provide clean-vox interjections. Both tracks are demented in the best way.

su dance110 - 101111111 Ash [su dance110 Bandcamp]
Dan Su is a dancer and choreographer, composer and producer based in Berlin. Their music and performance works are often intertwined, with the audio coming out under the name su dance110. Shang Can (殇残) extends from their 2021 opera & dance work Gentle Brutality, which explored homelessness and structural oppression. I'm not sure what the binary elements in the artist and track names mean, but it points to a corresponding interplay in the music itself, between the electronics, noise, fractured beats on the one hand, and elements of folk musics from ethnic minorities in Yunan province, and more operatic/classical elements. It's a very now hybridisation, but draws deeply from Su's own experience to produce something very compelling.

bela - 풀이 [Subtext Recordings/Unsound/Bandcamp]
Hard to believe, Noise and Cries 굉​음​과 울음 is the first time bela has recorded their voice. For much of the album it's the centrepiece - wailing, growling, screaming and sometimes singing purely, while industrial electronics and shards of club beats clamour. These works were first conceived while bela was living in Seoul, alienated and unsupported in a society that is, as they say, "slow to embrace those who exist on the margins". Amid their fixation with death, the emotions in these works are often harsh and pained, but bela was adamant that they express the opposing, deep desire to live. And so among the intense, disturbing (and excellent) material there are more uplifting pieces like "풀이" (which they translate as "unwinding"), in which cavernous, distant beats underscore sampled voices that float and soothe.

Use Knife - Ptolemaic (Zoë Mc Pherson Remix) [Morphine Records/Bandcamp]
Belgian/Iraqi trio Use Knife combine Arabic percussion and vocals with psychedelic electronics of all sorts. They released their debut album The Shedding of Skin in 2022, and now Berlin label Morphine Records (run by Lebanese musician Rabih Beaini) has released a 3-track remix EP, Peace Carnival. A couple of months ago I played the excellent rework by the brilliant Palestinian producer Muqata'a مقاطعة. Alongside Beaini himself we find Zoë Mc Pherson working jungle/techno breaks in amongst the electronics and Saif Al-Qaissy's Arabic vocals.

Comatone - XVLab (2004) [Feral Media/Bandcamp]
Katoomba resident Greg Seiler's early releases as Comatone, on the Feral Media label, helped hook our local scene into the international music I was playing. Greg's facility with complex beats and sound design made Comatone's music as exciting as any other electronica I'd play. In 2008 Comatone released an album with Sydney drummer Alon Ilsar as Comatone & Foley, but sometime in the following years he withdrew from the limelight, although Alon has presented the music from that album & its follow-up live with his Airsticks. This week, Greg contacted me to let me know that Feral Media will be releasing a series of EPs catching up unreleased Comatone music from the last untold amounts of time, which is great news. The glitch IDM beats of "XVLab" are the earliest, and there's work from the 2010s and even more recently coming our way - keep an eye on Bandcamp!

Monokle - Turn to Myself [Fuselab/Bandcamp]
St Petersberg Vlad Kudryavtsev's productions as Monokle go back nearly as far as Comatone. It's melodic and comforting music with nods to classic IDM sounds along the lines of Arovane, early Autechre, and hints of the ambient techno of Future Sound of London too. Comforting on headphones or on the right kind of dancefloors.

Lakker - Sparkle In The Dark [YUKU/Bandcamp]
Irish duo Lakker's second EP for YUKU is Pathway. It's got everything the pair excel at - assured rhythms from across bass & rave culture, with sound design to match. On "Sparkle In The Dark" the squashed remnants of death metal riffs hide behind nimble synth melodies and lopsided rhythms that coalesce at the 2/3 mark with punchy bass and skittery beats before dissolving back into stuttery samples.

Stefan Goldmann - Helicon [Macro/Bandcamp]
Speaking of lopsided techno, Stefan Goldmann has been a 4/4 Berlin techno & deep house god for over 2 decades, but is also connected to the classical concert hall via his Dad, composer Friedrich Goldmann, and his interests range widely to take in field recording, abstract sound-art, jazz and more, as attested by the long discography of Macro Recordings, the label he runs with Finn Johannsen. For some time he was interested in strange tunings, culminating in the custom, bent microtunings of 2019's Tacit Script. The same year, Veiki began a new phase exploring unusual beat cycles in techno, repeating in 7, 9 or 11 crotchets (or beats, if you like). This was followed in 2022 with the Vector Rituals LP, in which the strictures of bar lines were further loosened, through the phasing of odd time signatures as well as micro-shifts in tempo and note placement. These rhythm experiments culminate now with the full-length album Alluvium, which blends crossing time signatures with polyrhythms at various tempos. There's everything here: rapid-fire percussion which can sound like tablas, drum machines and even the shadows of cut-up breakbeats; haunted drones and translucent melodies a la Aphex Twin's SAW II; thumping syncopated sub-bass as heard tonight... There are tracks with the beats and rhythms barely heard through the murk of sonic textures, and there are tracks that would be techno slammers if only the bar lines lined up. Goldmann is prolific by any standards, and this is one of many recent works that I'd unhesitatingly recommend.
By the way, Macro has recently launched a subscription on their Bandcamp, which will soon include exclusive content as well as all future releases.

Low End Activist - Airdrop 07 (Tango Skit) [Peak Oil/Bandcamp]
Jamie Russell co-runs Hypercolour Records, and also runs the brilliant Sneaker Social Club, bringing all manner of bass music, jungle, hardcore, dubstep and so on to light. And if you look deep enough you'll find he's also the figure behind BRUK, a record label we've heard of late exploring the experimental edges of those kinds of bass music, including the recent abstractions of hoyah. He's recorded as Patrick Conway (oh hey, let's stop mid-sentence and marvel at the brilliance of 2021's Cellular Housekeeping!) but we know him best as Low End Activist. As the alias suggests, it's bass music, whether it be jungle & drum'n'bass, dubstep & grime, uk garage or whatever else. The brilliant LA label Peak Oil has hooked him for his latest album, Airdrop, which references UK hardcore circa '92 across its nine tracks. This isn't just rave revivalism though: the airhorns, stabs, basslines, hooversounds and 3-note chord riffs are judiciously meted out, and even when the breakbeats get to rattle over bouncing sub-bass they'll be interrupted by synth pads - and there's a through-line of dub delays and reverbs reminding us that we're viewing these day-long dance marathons through staticky VHS tapes and time- and drug-addled memory. Taken as a whole, it's as moving a tribute as Lee Gamble's prescient Diversions 1994-1996 from back in 2012, which built ambient, abstract disintegration loops out of the beatless sections of his old jungle mixtapes. Russell knows what he's doing here, and does it in style.

Brain Rays - Plugs (feat. Quiet) [Acroplane/Bandcamp]
When the much-missed Seagrave brought us Brain Rays & Quiet's first set of jungle/d'n'b/footwork hybrids, 2020's Butter, it took some time for me to realise that I'd been a fan of Benjamin Hudson aka Brain Rays back in the mid-'00s when he was making breakcore & mutant dubstep as Ebola. He's also a co-founder of Bristol's Wrong Music with DJ Scotch Egg and Matt Lambert. Slime, his new solo album for long-lived Irish netlabel Acroplane, brings this accumulated history together with references to jungle, footwork, breakcore, grime, dubstep, hardcore and IDM through its 10 tracks, with feature spots on almost every track. Fittingly, the track with Quiet heads up the album - before Brain Rays & Quiet they were producing weird hip-hop as Baconhead, and the seamless footwork/jungle here is a tribute to their long musical partnership. Come for that, but stay for tracks with experimental ravers Chevron and Neil Landstrumm, and much more.

bagel fanclub - you arrived, pink slap [bagel fanclub Bandcamp]
bagel fanclub - we found a spider with a skull on its back [bagel fanclub Bandcamp]
From first-gen breakcore to The New Generation™, UK/US duo bagel fanclub aka Caybee Calabash and River Everett. They are carrying on, or reviving, the traditions of madcap, hyper-distorted, glitchily cut-up breaks and angelic melodies, but of course the intervening decades have filtered those sounds through videogame soundtracks, while adjacent forms like footwork have gained greater public awareness. Chiptune is also a big influence, so even though they're made on contemporary laptops, they sound like they've come straight out of Impulse Tracker with resampled 128k mp3s. Most importantly, this shit be fun. There's a new album coming, encore county ground, which I'm lucky to have a preview copy of, so I sneakily played the opening track tonight; but before its release they snuck out a new EP with the matching name acorn out of bounds. Thematically similar, its 6 tracks segue on from each other and are both manic and melodic. For additional dizziness, try to read the Bandcamp description...

Sasha Elina - Tomás Cabado – A Song [Sasha Elina Bandcamp]
Different Songs, Vol 1, the new album from London-based Russian singer Саша Елина / Sasha Elina finds her interpreting the music of four contemporary composers, with compositions for solo voice and voice in duos with piano and guitar. The album's opening track, an a capella by German composer Eva-Maria Houben called "My Sweet Love", is captivating in Elina's fragile voice, but directly following it is a song by Argentinian composer & guitarist Tomás Cabado. Or should I say "A Song", as that's its title? Here the duo is with piano, played by Tim Parkinson somewhere else in London from where Elina recorded her voice, but they mesh together again with fragile poise.

Bryan Senti & Dom Bouffard - The Ground [naïve records]
Killing Horizon, the new collaboration between Colombian-American multi-instrumentalist Bryan Senti and Anglo-French gutiarist Dom Bouffard, is set for release on the 25th of October this year - a long while off! But the first single, The Ground gives a window into their music together - improvised and composed non-linearly by each musician in their homes (yep, Covid music!) with a couple of guests. The two are experienced session musicians who've played with a wide range of pop & rock artists, but this is much more on the experimental spectrum, with Senti's murmuring low-end piano overlaid with Bouffard's backmasked guitar washes and slowly joined with discordant string drones and shimmering guitar, before the storm recedes, leaving Bouffard's clean, poignant electric guitar lines. One to look forward to.

Love Is Yes - Somewhere Nowhere [Kit Records/Bandcamp]
New discovery, on London's Kit Records, is a duo from The Hague. Love Is Yes is the name of the duo, and the name of the album, and the music is pleasingly blurry, easily slipping from your mind's grasp, but demanding your close, repeated listening. It's really impossible to describe what's in here, as the instrumentation shifts and changes, or is downsampled and looped unrecognizably. At times Dax Niesten introduces her soft voice, elsewhere it's absent. Is it acoustic here? Well then it's electronica there, now hinting at krautrock, now dissolving away. The track heard tonight, lovely though it is, only gives you one shard of what's found within.

Gina Lo - vocal exercise [Unexplained Sounds]
姚春旸 Chunyang Yao - Remnant [Unexplained Sounds]
Raffaele Pezzella curates the group of labels and album series under the umbrella of Unexplained Sounds Group from Italy. A maker of post-industrial music as Sonologyst (among other names), he has industrial & dark ambient sub-labels, but he's also a keen curator of experimental music from all around the world, bringing word of adventurous artists from Persia, Lebanon, Latin America, the African continent, Scandinavia, Greece and more, and he has collected music from China and Indonesia but here has collected 20 tracks from artists in the "Far East". There are contributors here from Indonesia, Nepal, China, Taiwan, Japan, Singapore and more - it's worth noting that you can click through each track on the Bandcamp page to find short bios for each artist! There are wondrous sounds here, from imposing drone to punk noise, glitch and more. Berlin-based Taiwanese artist Gina Lo combines extended vocal techniques with processing on her "vocal exercise", and 姚春旸 Chunyang Yao, a Naxi woman working in sound-art and composition as well as voice & electronics, here also processes her voice along with electronic noise. You can easily lose yourself in Unexplained Sounds' myriad anthologies, and it's well worth it!

Listen again — ~200MB

Sunday, 7th of April, 2024

It's been four weeks since I was last here! Three Sundays in Japan (amazing of course), in which the excellent Mara Schwerdtfeger kept you company - huge thanks to Mara!

LISTEN AGAIN to all the things! Stream on demand at FBi or podcast here.

Meril Wubslin - Pas là [Bongo Joe Records/Bandcamp]
Starting with a wonderful discovery, courtesy I think of one of the Bandcamp Daily posts. Meril Wubslin are a Swiss trio, singing in French, combining post-rock and krautrock and indie rock and French chanson. The two singer/guitarists, Valérie Niederoest and Christian Garcia-Gaucher, have a history in Swiss indie bands, but when they're joined by French hardcore/math rock/noise rock drummer David Costenaro the band comes into their own: cyclical melodies and guitar lines powered by muscular percussion - probably helped by the production of Kwake Bass here, on their fourth album Faire ça. Anyway, it's always good to be reminded that the Francophone music scene is really rich and creative, and the two albums I've heard of Meril Wubslin easily attest to that.

Aquaserge - Le saut du tigre [Crammed Discs/Bandcamp]
Speaking of, here's the unpredictable French band Aquaserge, who I last heard in 2021 with their postrock/jazz tribute to various 20th century avant-garde composers, The Possibility Of A New Work For Aquaserge (a play on Morton Feldman's "The Possibility of a New Work for Electric Guitar"). In general, though, the band has traded in a kind of French prog/art/psych rock with jazz influences and somehow quite pop. The first single from their forthcoming album La fin de l'economie (released again on legendary Belgian label Crammed Discs) has a percussive backbone with synth riffs and a simple vocal melody echoed on electric guitar - until it opens up with close-knit synth harmonies. Somehow the total effect is not that far from the hypnotic grooves of Meril Wubslin.

Post Neo - Die Verwirrung [Monika Enterprise/Bandcamp]
Staying in Europe for a while still, here's Berlin-based duo Post Neo, aka Pauline Weh and Nicole Luján, whose second EP Alles Immer Wieder combines synths, percussion and vocals in a way that's closer to techno than the previous two acts: programmed beats, slightly robotic vocals and warm percussive bass. But still, the songwriting and even production cast themselves back to '70s avant-pop as much as any contemporary trends. Comfortably housed at Gudrun Gut's Monika Enterprise, it's prime leftfield German stuff.

Sunna Margrét - 4 Year Itch [No Salad Records/Bandcamp]
I first heard Icelandic musician Sunna Margrét (previously known just as Sunna) around 2018 via Wire Magazine. Some six years later, after some smaller releases, comes her debut album Finger on Tongue, via Swiss label No Salad Records. Centred around Sunna's vocal layering and off-kilter electronics, it's understated loveliness.

By The Waterhole with Stephan Meidell - ding ding dong [Playdate Records]
Eva Pfitzenmaier is a German artist, musician and writer based for many years in Bergen, Norway. Her latest album three comes 8 years after two and 11 years after one, but she's been involved with various other Norwegian jazz & experimental projects in the meantime. Her previous solo work has been entirely her own work, with electronics and improvised instruments as well as sometimes improvised vocals, coming together into frequently catchy leftfield pop. Her husband Stephan Meidell, who we've heard here in various Norwegian postrock/jazz/electronic lineups, has worked with her for years, but her third solo album acknowledges the partnership with Meidell as co-creator. The album has had a long gestation, so to speak, as it was begun in 2016, when Pfitzenmaier & Meidell's first child was born. It reflects on family, motherhood and love, but there's a good dose of the oddness that characterises Pfitzenmaier's work, strange electronics, wonky beats, weird structures. There's a lot to enjoy here.

Thea Grant - century caves [Shadow World/Hot Salvation/Bandcamp]
Coincidentally jumping from Bergen to Oslo, still in Norway, here's the extraordinary vocalist/composer/electronic musician Thea Grant, whose album Water and Dreams is largely made up of patient, multitracked vocal pieces, interspersed with heavy electronics of a particularly deconstructed club sound. Her voice is beautifully controlled, and is further augmented with subtle electronic effects, producing an otherworldly sensation - water and dreams indeed. This album should really be on your radar.

Perc - Can You Imagine? [Perc Trax]
I think of Ali Wells' Perc as the hardest of hard techno, and it can be that, but he's someone with wide musical interests - some of his earliest productions were drum'n'bass, although I'm not sure if anything was released. He's remixed early Einstürzende Neubauten, and there's no doubt that there's industrial influences in his sound. But on his new album The Cut Off, the 100th release on his influential Perc Trax and his first album in 7 years, there are rich quasi-choral and ambient interludes (not unusually for his album releases) among the admittedly fierce 4-to-the-floor bangers. "Can You Imagine?" combines the two together, and I do love how the hammering beats glitch in about a third of the way through.

Heejin Jang - Colors: I'm Here! [Venalism]
As her bio on Bandcamp says, South Korean artist Heejin Jang "make[s] something noisy". Her music is spread over many on-point labels, and if you haven't heard last year's Me and the Glassbirds on Doom Trip, you'd best correct that now. Yes noise, but artfully composed & arranged hyperglitch and dronescapes and anything that can make noises really. This track from her new album Dream Signal on Edinburgh tape label Venalism is the best: granulated vocal samples stuttering into almost-rhythm, humour and the uncanny in equal parts.

Hanno Leichtmann / Valerio Tricoli - Brunswick green [Ni Vu Ni Connu/Bandcamp]
Both these artists have some connection to noise music, but also everything from postrock to improv to techno. Cinnte le Dia is the third release from Berlin sound-artist & curator Hanno Leichtmann and Berlin-based Italian musician Valerio Tricoli, a founding member of the legendary Bologna postrock/sound-art/avant-garde group 3/4HadBeenEliminated. The pair's previous albums were released on the legendary Entr'acte in 2016 and 2018, both uncompromising albums of abstract sound manipulation with a very musical core. This album combines spontaneous live creation with post-production and overdubs on synth-bass and Revox tape recorder, the result being music that's informed by dub and techno as much as concrète and sound-art - it's a real pleasure to listen to (as are the two earlier releases!)

Nick Wales, Rrawun Maymuru - Yolngu (Deepchild Vocal Reconstruction) [Motorik!/Bandcamp]
What better way to get into the real techno & dance side of the show but with the wonderful Yolgnu songman from Northeast Arnhem Land, Rrawun Maymuru (lead singer of East Journey), and composer, violist and electronic musician Nick Wales? They've collaborated before for Sydney Dance Company, but this new song, simply entitled Yolgnu, is hopefully the beginning of a bigger project. The song comes with club and ambient mixes from Nick Wales, but also a reworking from Eora/Sydney's own Deepchild that's aimed directly at the dancefloor. The song is a wonderful call for pride of the Yolgnu people, and sitting between the classical and electronic worlds, Nick is a great partner with Rrawun to help bring this music to the world.

Pugilist - Destructor [Pugilist Bandcamp]
Naarm-based sub-destroyer, whether at 170bpm/jungle tempo or 140bpm/dubstep, Pugilist has started putting "Ruff Trax" EPs up on his Bandcamp: Vol 1 was basically jungle, and Vol 2 is 140 stuff - although there are plenty of breakbeats strewn through these tracks. Always quality.

HALFNELSON - Presa [Nina]
Will Yates' best-known alias Memotone, in its early days, was an outlet for leftfield bass music. Even then, though, his incredible skills across drumkit and percussion, keyboards and myriad other instruments were leading him into less dancefloor-oriented sounds. As well as projects like the weird-folk of O.G. Jigg, Memotone itself nowadays is an outlet for Yates' multi-instrumentalism, in jazz/folk/ambient settings, only sometimes veering into beats. Meanwhile, HALFNELSON is the place where you'll find him making techno and 4/4 beats, but also tape-saturated lo-fi hip-hop as is found amongst the four tracks of Yoga Om Knowledge. Yates has released the EP exclusively on Nina, a platform that came out of the NFT hype, but successfully shed the blockchain nonsense (you can pay with cryptocurrency, but you can also pay in normal ways). You can listen yourself, and when you buy it, note that there's a "Bonus material" tab where you can download WAVs.

BEANS - ZWAARD 2 [BEANS Bandcamp]
In the latest issue of The Wire the editorial waxes lyrical about how forward-thinking Antipop Consortium were in the late '90s & early '00s, and I do kind of agree - their mix of IDM and glitch with avant-garde lyricism while staying true to hip-hop was pretty groundbreaking, although I always found their releases kind of hit & miss, and they didn't touch me, somehow. After a long silence, the band is getting back together, which is good news - although when I say silence, that's only as a collective (er, consortium). High Priest of Antipop has been active with experimental sound and melding jazz with electronica as Hprizm, and BEANS, BEANS just does not stop, and dude is dedicated to abstract raps with experimental electronics. In March 2017 he released three albums all at once (see the bottom three albums on his Bandcamp music page), and there's been at least one album a year since then - I recall Nibiru Tut being rad too. Well, BEANS is a good enough reason to check out ZWAARD, his latest album, but there's another hook: the whole thing is produced by Sasu Ripatti aka Vladislav Delay. Crazier still: Mr Delay sent BEANS a bunch of sample tracks to start a collab, material from about 10 years ago, and BEANS insisted on making his tracks directly from those demos - only a little tweaking from Vlad. If we go looking, we'll see that 2013-2014 was when a series of phenomenal tricksy dance EPs came out under his surname Ripatti - they're there on his Bandcamp, Ripatti01 to Ripatti07, footwork/idm hybrids that were the precursors of the recent Dancefloor Classics EPs. So honestly they sound up-to-the-minute, and a perfect sound base for BEANS to riff on. Ridiculously great stuff.

Eks - Os_ag [Opal]
Is Eks hip-hop? Can I say "among other things"? Napoli producer Guido Marziale, who's appeared on the great Italian label A Flooded Need, UK breakcore-adjacent label ADAADAT, and Bristol's Avon Terror Corps, but Throw-Up Concrète is his most high-profile yet - a full album released by Opal (who seem to have just lost the "Tapes", although this album is indeed released on tape!). The "concrète" part is a hint, but then so is "throw-up": this is music as indebted to noise as it is to sound design as it is to hip-hop. There are two guest spots from Sensational, the Brooklyn rapper who like BEANS frequently works in the experimental electronic space, and spots from both D.HAM and Franco Franco of recent Bokeh Versions album Parable Of The Empty Cup. But Eks doesn't need guests to make compellingly oddball noise-hop. Full of weird messed-up sounds and messed-up beats, Throw-Up Concrète is a winner.

hoyah - Dubblebubble [BRUK]
Sam (Shmuel) Hatchwell has worked as sound engineer and producer for some time, and as DJ has found himself in the revered climes of Berlin's Berghain. But his solo music, under the name hoyah, is only now really surfacing. The album Set + Setting comes out on BRUK, one of Low End Activist's labels that has heretofore focused on the more experimental end of jungle/club musics, but hoyah has experimented it way out of the park (sorry for the stretched metaphor). The album is constructed from a base of saxophone samples - masses of them, loaded into his trusty MPC. His self-imposed limitations stipulated that the sax sounds would be the "voice", there would be no "beats", and it would mostly be constructed away from the computer. Nevertheless, here on "Dubblebubble" we've certainly got percussive sounds - maybe not "beats" - around the lushly glitchy sax samples. As for the artist name, as well as a reference to a truly irritating TikTok meme ("can I get a hoya"), "hoyah" is an obscure word in Biblical Hebrew, a feminine form of "to be". As tends to crop up in the current climate, Hatchwell seeks to differentiate Jewish lore, culture and religion from the ongoing genocidal actions of the State of Israel. The conflation of Judaism with Zionism, as a tactic to brand any opposition to Israel as antisemitic, has reached a particularly vicious level of hysteria in Germany, and particularly Berlin, so it's no wonder Hatchwell feels the need to make this statement. Ceasefire now!

Phelimuncasi & Metal Preyers - Gqom slowgen Chant [Nyege Nyege Tapes/Bandcamp]
On their new album Izigqinamba, South African gqom crew Phelimuncasi take their raps and singing, in the isiZulu language, further into experimental waters than they have in the past. Here they have teamed up with fellow Nyege Nyege Tapes artist Metal Preyers, presumably predominately the work of Jesse Hackett, who with visual artist Mariano Chavez has released some of the most original and confounding music on the label. In this collaborative album the abstract tendencies of Metal Preyers are somewhat controlled, and Phelimuncasi manage to be as evocative and exhilarating as ever, even on darker, more downtempo tracks like "Gqom slowgen Chant".

Saint Abdullah & Eomac - Jealous of your defense industry [Drowned By Locals/Bandcamp]
The ongoing collaboration between NY-based Iranian brothers Saint Abdullah and Berlin-based Dubliner Eomac continues apace. Their latest, a full album entitled Light meteors crashing around you will not confuse you, comes courtesy of Jordanian label of exquisite taste, Drowned By Locals. Inevitably this album exists in the shadow of the war in Gaza, and all proceeds will go to UNRWA. Musically it's in some ways more chaotic than the two brilliant releases on Planet µ last year, but at the same time, as Eomac points out, it takes cues from hip-hop's beat tapes, filtered through the experimental sound techniques of the artists, everything crunched and distorted and taking frequent left turns into something else. It's deliberately disorienting, and it's deliberately evocative of loss and upheaval. Another important release from a phenomenal partnership.

Jana - Eb3ed 3ani [Yuku]
Prague label YUKU continues to come through with the goods. Here's a single from London-based Lebanese producer/sound-artist/DJ Jana Saleh, which de/reconstructs the sound of shaabi, Egyptian urban music. But just one track certainly leaves us wanting more!

Christoph de Babalon - Backward Gallop [Midnight Shift/Bandcamp]
Among the many pleasures of the jungle revival and the concomitant breakcore revival has been observing the original artists still around today, or inspired to start releasing new tracks. Christoph de Babalon was an enigmatic and iconoclastic figure in the Digital Hardcore days, where the Berlin scene picked up on that key era where hardcore techno morphed into jungle, and amped up the distortion to the max alongside anarchist/leftist politics. In a way, de Babalon never left - or if he did, it was between 2000 and 2008. But in recent years archival collections have appeared alongside new material, very much in keeping with the dark ambient and jungle/breakcore material he began with. Here, Singapore label Midnight Shift give us four new tracks on vinyl & digital, and we know the drill: hard-hitting cut-up breaks and bass, classical-leaning dark ambient interludes. It's a vibe.

Bankert - brainstorm [Bankert]
Hailing from Liechtenstein, electronic producer Bankert does not reveal very much about themself. They're up to ol05, the 5th release on Bandcamp, and have a contemporary take on idm, with hyper-edited beats and vocal snatches. The releases are all "name your price", so you really should!

Klahrk - &3&4 [SFX/Bandcamp]
London producer Ben Clarke spells himself Klahrk, presumably so that at least written-down he won't get confused with (Chris) Clarke. Blistering is Klahrk's second release on Zoë Mc Pherson & Alessandra Leone's SFX label. These tracks are driven by thundering bass hits syncopating under chittering percussive beats and glitched vocal snippets. Futuristic doomclub.

Aroma Nice - moan [YUKU]
Luke Fashoni started his jungle/breaks/downtempo alter-ego Aroma Nice over 10 years ago, and has collaborated with Earl Grey as Monologue (released on YUKU back in 2022), but now Old Haunts is his second solo release on YUKU and feels like a giant leap. Along with the jazzy samples and junglist drumfunk there's a juddering low-end throughout "moan" that brings a heavy intensity while gentle pads float over the top. Meanwhile "over the top" is a good description of the break-juggling madness. More complex than the drill'n'bass heroes of the mid-'90s, more in touch with jungle's sub-bass, and more nuanced than the breakcore shenanigans that came after... we're living in a golden age, enjoy it while it lasts!

DJ Strawberry - Çıkmaz [outlines]
Turkish producer DJ Strawberry is also harnessing bass energy, here in the context of Polish label outlines' mission of experimental approaches to Chicago footwork. DJ Strawberry put his new album Beyond together in the shadow of the horrific earthquake that hit Turkey early last year, and the music is a kind of escape from those dark emotions. The acid synths burbling under the jittering hi-hats and bass rumble on "Çıkmaz" seem to flow logically out of Aroma Nice's bass'n'breaks.

Michael Vincent Waller - Jennifer (Loraine James Remix) [play loud! productions/Bandcamp]
Michael Vincent Waller - Return from LA II (Moor Mother Remix) [play loud! productions/Bandcamp]
New York (post-)minimalist composer Michael Vincent Waller put out his Moments album on Unseen Worlds in 2019, a lovely collection of piano and vibraphone pieces with beguiling harmonies and hidden melodies reminiscent of Erik Satie or Philip Glass. The same year Moments came out, Waller had been talking with Jlin - who incidentally has a collaboration with Glass on her new album Akoma - and something about their shared aesthetics and thoughts about music sparked the idea for this remix album, Moments Remixes, out now on play loud! productions. The artists range from ambient to rave, glitch-hop to idm, and in keeping with its origins there are a pleasing number of women and non-binary artists - it's really worth checking out for people like Ka Baird, Prefuse 73, Xiu Xiu, Fennesz and of course Jlin, but I can rarely go past Loraine James, and her glitchy cut-ups of the original material with skittery beats are a joy. On the other end of the spectrum, Moor Mother brings heaviness with her rather unsettling spoken word and crumbling atmos overdubbed on the original tender piano.

MIZU - Pavane [NNA Tapes/Bandcamp]
New York-based cellist MIZU began composing the music for her second album Forest Scenes during a period based in São Paulo, and finished it in New York. Initially the album can sound like electronic ambient, but pretty soon you realise how much cello is contributing to the sounds here - there are melodies, processed textures, rhythmic parts. This ambiguity is part of the point of Forest Scenes, which uses the forest as a metaphor for queer spaces, and while the album was coming together, MIZU was herself undergoing physical gender transition. There are rich allusions in the works on this album, and there's a depth to the music too - layers to discover over multiple listens. Avant-garde and future-focused cello music is always one of my obsessions, and it's fruitfully rewarded on this album.

Hochzeitskapelle - We Dance feat. Enid Valu [Alien Transistor/Bandcamp]
We have the brothers Acher from The Notwist to thank for bringing us this understated EP from Munich acoustic/folk (wait, "rumplejazz") ensemble Hochzeitskapelle through their Alien Transistor label. Made up of viola, banjo, tuba, trumpet, trombone, drums, and perhaps other acoustic instruments at times, they have a ruffled, ramshackle sound that instantly lends the music a kind of "authenticity". On two of the four tracks here they're joined by Enid Valu, who is a filmmaker and photographer, usually documenting rather than performing, and her relatively unschooled voice is beautifully touching. Oh and this is a covers EP - indie heroes Pavement, Yo La Tengo and Low, plus German pop-rock band Wir Sind Helden. Initially Low's "Silver Rider" seems a little too bare-bones, with the melody carried on banjo, but at the chorus the trombone takes over, gloriously. This is really special stuff. Tonight I played the cover of Pavement's "We Dance" (the opener of Wowee Zowee), already a languid song from the quintessential slacker band, which effortlessly translates into the band's acoustic world.

Kelly Moran - Butterfly Phase [Warp/Bandcamp]
While New York pianist/composer Kelly Moran's first album for Warp showcased her prepared piano and electronics, Moves in the Field is lush in a different way. Here "clean" piano is in dialogue with a Yamaha Disklavier, which is a kind of digital version of a player piano - it's a mechanical, acoustic piano and can be used to record a performance that can then be played back without the performer. But as Moran shows here, it can be programmed to "perform" the piano is ways that are technically unavailable to a single human pianist - echoing the insanity of Conlon Nancarrow's impossible player piano compositions, punched into the device's control sheet so that it does crazy stuff like this. Nothing on this record is as extreme as Nancarrow, but it lends an uncanny sheen to what are in fact beautiful compositions.

Nadah El-Shazly - Haircut [Asadun Alay Records/Bandcamp]
Now Montréal-based, but a pivotal figure in the Egyptian experimental music scene, Nadah El-Shazly is a composer, multi-instrumentalist and singer: most recently she made a stunning vocal contribution to Algiers' 2023 album Shook, and back in 2019 she joined the Egyptian/Lebanese/Turkish psych-rock/jazz supergroup Karkhana. Tonight we celebrate her soundtrack to British-Moroccan director Fyzal Boulifa's film The Damned Don't Cry, released in full now. El-Shazly's music is heartfelt but uncompromising, using harp, double bass and violin along with her voice and production.

Listen again — ~213MB

Sunday, 10th of March, 2024

Powerful transformative voices, powerful voices transformed, transformative instrumentals, beats of power.
This is my last UFog until April 7th, as I'll be in Japan for three Sundays!

LISTEN AGAIN if you dare! Podcast here, stream on demand @ FBi.

Kim Gordon - The Believers [Matador/Bandcamp]
Kim Gordon - I Don't Miss My Mind [Matador/Bandcamp]
The second album from Kim Gordon continues her collaboration with producer Justin Raisen, who provides overdriven beats that back Gordon's familiar speak-singing drawl - often stream-of-consciousness stuff, as encouraged by Raisen. If No Home Record was a shock, the first solo album from a figure of such huge significance in indie rock/postpunk for over 4 decades, The Collective has no less impact from following it. Career highs from an artist now in her 70s.

Moor Mother - Liverpool Wins (feat. Kyle Kidd) [ANTI-/Bandcamp]
Moor Mother - My Souls Been Anchored [ANTI-/Bandcamp]
Camae Ayewa has been one of the most in-demand guests on experimental albums of the last few years, but meanwhile keeps up her work with Irreversible Entanglements, 700 Bliss and Black Quantum Futurism - and of course solo work as Moor Mother. Moor Mother albums have never exactly been typical hip-hop, although the genre is so malleable and experimental to its core that this isn't saying much. The Great Bailout relentlessly dissects British colonialism and the slave trade, and their connections to capitalism & power today. It's musically challenging, as Moor Mother is nothing if not uncompromising, and this extends to collaborators like Lonnie Holley and Kyle Kidd. As impressive as Ayewa's poetry and delivery are, her genius is such that everything other than those guest spots is performed and produced by her too. The instrumental "My Souls Been Anchored" is no less political, with its collaged samples of blues and spirituals overlaid with the rumblings of industry. This album is challenging but essential listening.

Dali de Saint Paul & Maxwell Sterling - 4 [Accidental Meetings/Bandcamp]
The vocals and effects of Bristol artist Dali de Saint Paul have been found in many contexts over the last many years, including on Moor Mother's 2019 album Analog Fluids of Sonic Black Holes and UKAEA's recent Birds Catching Fire in the Sky. I first came across double bass player & electronic musician Maxwell Sterling on a collaboration with Martha Skye Murphy called Distance on Ground, although he also had a well-praised album on AD 93 in 2021. Their duo Penumbra came out of an improvised session on BBC Radio 3's Late Junction. Both musicians loop and process their sounds live - de Saint Paul's voice chopped into short rhythmic phrases or singing long melodies; Sterling's double basses and Lyra stretched into waves or sped up into high-pitched streams. Intriguing, engrossing stuff.

Erika Angell - Good And Bad [Constellation/Bandcamp]
Erika Angell - German Singer [Constellation/Bandcamp]
Swedish musician Erika Angell has been based in Montréal for many years, which explains her new album The Obsession With Her Voice appearing on the legendary Constellation label. Angell is a classically- and jazz-trained singer who's played in indie rock and industrial outfits and collaborated wide and far. On the new album, her shapeshifting vocals are accompanied by her synths and electronics, along with live drums from Mili Hong and a string section of cellos and violas. The abstract aspects of jazz, classical and electronic music all contribute to songs which nevertheless are song-shaped, whether Angell is whispering or howling, singing richly or processing her voice robotically. For those of us new to her work, a revelation.

Shoeb Ahmad - demotion [Provenance/Bandcamp]
Aphir - HAND ON YOUR HEART [Provenance/Bandcamp]
Hey! Lucky you, you get a preview of Marks of Provenance VII, the latest label compilation from the Provenance Collective. It's out this coming Friday, March 15th, and is choc full of Provenance artists like Arrom, Happy Axe, Sebastian Field, ROMÆO, Imogen Cygler, Ashleigh Hazel and... Avril Lavigne? All will be revealed, but tonight we heard a wonderful piece of creepy industrial looping from friend-of-'Fog Shoeb Ahmad, and a tour de force from Aphir featuring slamming beats, processed voice and her multi-tracked choral work.

Vanessa Bedoret - Choice [Scenic Route]
Vanessa Bedoret - 1/2 [Scenic Route]
It's disarming to find the an album as accomplished as Vanessa Bedoret's Eyes is the artist's debut. Bedoret (French, but now based in London) learned classical violin from childhood, played guitar in punk bands, and her violin and love of punk & metal are present in this album, even though its most comfortable category is experimental electronic. The music on Eyes bears the hallmarks of today's deconstructed club music, occasionally reconstructing itself into something that might be danceable, but equally using the bass drops and fragmented beats as splashes of sound alongside her string lines and, at times, vocals. On these tracks, Bedoret's voice is used more as an instrument than a lead - multitracked into choral parts that are then chopped as fodder for electronic processing - although there are some more conventional song-like tracks. It's music that will appeal to fans of experimental electronic music past & present, as well as post-classical and the experimental end of shoegaze (e.g. Seefeel). So that means YOU!

Marcus Whale - Shepherd's Voice [Marcus Whale Bandcamp]
Marcus Whale - ∞ [Marcus Whale Bandcamp]
The new album from Sydney polymath Marcus Whale comes as CD, if you want it, which contains a great discussion of some of the album's themes between Marcus and his flatmate/Sleepless in Sydney co-host Gus McGrath. So what's it about? Well, Ecstasy innit? It's a concept of infinite potential: the idea of going outside of oneself, of losing the bounaries between the self & the universe is one encountered in music and dance, in all creative practice really - as well as in sex and extreme sports and no doubt drug use. Of course on the album the ecstasy of the dancefloor looms high, those hammering kick drums recurring through the album - as does queer love and loving. The kick drum assault and snarling bass somewhat offset Marcus's choirboy-sweet voice, but mostly it's an album of sweetness, maybe sweetness found in the dark.

New Corroded - Tap Out [Vast Habitat/Bandcamp]
New Corroded - Chromosphere [Vast Habitat/Bandcamp]
Last year we heard quite a bit from Guy Brewer, known for his dark techno as Shifted but recently releasing more syncopated, higher-paced music as Carrier. I wasn't expecting to find this collaboration, though, which pairs Brewer with Daniel Lea, most recently released as CURA MACHINES on Bedouin Records, but previously appearing as half of Heliochrysum on Bedroom Community, having released two brilliant Talk Talk-inspired albums as L A N D - Night Within and Anoxia. Initially, New Corroded's debut Pass Lightly seems more like Brewer's work - imposing industrial techno - but there are elements of the glimmering synths found in Heliochrysum, and L A N D's rhythmic variation. Released on Lea's Vast Habitat on transparent vinyl, the album comes highly recommended.

Oliver Coates - France [Invada/Bandcamp]
Oliver Coates - How can you say [Invada/Bandcamp]
I said last week that Invada snuck out a couple of tracks early from Oliver Coates' sound track to the Mary & George TV series, a period drama (although it seems more like dark comedy?) about the gay lover of King James I in the early 17th century. Coates is an accomplished cellist in the contemporary classical world, as well as working with indie rock & pop acts, and has released some great experimental electronic music too. Given the period this show is set in, I expected mostly classical-sounding music, so it's a surprise to find the wonky junglisms of "How can you say", or the sparse, almost industrial (yet acoustic) rhythms found elsewhere. There are a lot of tracks, and a lot are just short cues, but there's lovely more developed music there too. I imagine Invada are banking of the show being a success, and reviews so far as very positive. Congrats Coates!

T Goldsmith - Accidentally Carelessly Thoughtlessly [DRUT Recordings/Bandcamp]
Until recently, Tom Goldsmith was better known playing in folk rock bands like Circulus, but Kelpe released an electronic EP last year on his DRUT Recordings, and thus T Goldsmith was born. His second EP Antimeta is a real pleasure, with some of that psych folk aesthetic bleeding through (Kelpe himself came out of the folktronica scene, such as it was), and flowing jungle/drum'n'bass beats. Lovely for home listening and chillout rooms (I wish they still existed!)

Ruffie - Perception [Locked Up Music]
From Romanian DJ/producer Ruffie, an excellent new EP of jungle-tinged d'n'b on Section's label Locked Up Music. Different styles, from clipped breaks to more flowing, sci-fi synths to jazz samples, very tasty.

DJ Birdbath - Kitsch Memory [Theory Therapy/Bandcamp]
New Zealand producer DJ Birdbath, who I believe had been based in Naarm/Melbourne but is now in Wellington, releases a full album, Memory Empathy, through Eora/Sydney's own Theory Therapy. It's equal parts vaporwave and jungle/trip-hop, coming in at a different angle from, say, Yunzero. In DJ Birdbath's hands '80s samples (there's definitely Kate Bush in there) and internet detritus can be reshaped around more familiar beat structures - of course jungle & "trip-hop" or "downtempo" or whatever we want to call it are themselves echoes of a now-distant past for anyone older than their mid-20s. DJ Birdbath approaches these memories with empathy, but recognizes how they are transformed at distance ("Kitsch Memory"). Memory Empathy will reward repeat listens.

woodgraves - Izanagi [Tree Critters]
The Massive Dragon - Deeper [Tree Critters]
Delightful breakcore/idm duo Bagel Fanclub directed me to this new compilation, and I want to say at the outset that their track "applebees iceblock" is a lovely melodic breakcore track that I would've played if I could fit it in. Both members also have tracks themselves on this 29-track compilation. Entitled Sounds for Solidarity: Palestine Relief Music Compilation, it will send funds to Palestinian Children's Relief Fund and Palestinian Red Crescent Society. And it's full of gems. Broadly, "Side A" is breakcore and junglish stuff, represented here by Chicago DJ/producer woodgraves with some warm & dark breaks at speed. "Side B" then is IDM at a more sedate pace (with exceptions), and Colorado's The Massive Dragon is one of the Tree Critters who put the comp together, with ping-pong (literally!) beats and calm synth pads.

Kevin Richard Martin/KMRU - If (Dub) [PTP/Bandcamp]
Saint Abdullah x Withdrawn & Birthmark - An Array Of Policy Options [PTP/Bandcamp]
Geng of PTP has always been a visionary of social change and resistance - many releases come with a free PDF of The End Of Policing by Alex S Vitale. The massive 95-track compilation RESIST COLONIAL POWER BY ANY MEANS NECESSARY features everyone, with no particular genre except probably somewhat experimental - there's hip-hop, rock, r'n'b, electronic music, acoustic music... A few tracks are missing - the compilation was delayed for a few weeks and Geng says the other tracks (currently 4 seconds of silence) will be uploaded eventually. I'm particularly keen for ELUCID, NikNak and Mariam Rezaei x Maria Chavez, but it's worth getting now anyway. I'd heard that Kevin Richard Martin (aka The Bug) was working on something with Nairobi ambient/experimental artist KMRU, and If (Dub) seems to be the first thing to venture out, very much melding Martin's desolate dub with KMRU's atmospherics. I first discovered NYC-based Iranian brothers Saint Abdullah via PTP, and they appear here with acerbic beats accompanying raps from Bristol's Withdrawn & Birthmark.

Joseph Franklin - the tension of things-in-motion [Nice Music/Bandcamp]
Joseph Franklin - of other potentialities quietly planting doubts [Nice Music/Bandcamp]
Finally for tonight, Naarm/Melbourne composer and bassist Joseph Franklin has released his debut solo album a thousand tiny mutinies through Nice Music. While Franklin has composed for orchestras, chamber ensembles and soloists before, this album is his own exploratory performances on a semi-hollow six-string contrabass guitar, which he prepares in various ways as well as post-producing - although I believe the sounds themselves are all generated from that bass guitar, whose hollow body allows for all sorts of acoustic "effects" as well as those produced through amplification. There's an uncanny nature to many of these tracks, where scraping, buzzing sounds masquerade as glitch, harsh drones are produced mechanically, and even the more regular fingerpicking doesn't obey familiar forms of harmony or melody. But don't try and work out the provenance of these sounds - just tune in and listen and you'll be richly rewarded.

Listen again — ~200MB

Sunday, 3rd of March, 2024

Music of great beauty and mystery, rhythms of great propulsion.

LISTEN AGAIN to the sign o' the times. Stream on demand at FBi, podcast here.

Armand Hammer - Doves feat. Benjamin Booker [Backwoodz Studioz/Bandcamp]
Following a flurry of collaborations, many of which I've played here, Armand Hammer have released a new song - except it's been plonked at the end of last year's We Buy Diabetic Test Strips as a bonus track. Which is weird because it's absolutely incredible, right up with their best. Guitar & very fragile vocals from elusive soul/blues/rock musician Benjamin Booker plus piano lines are gorgeously smeared throughout by the dubby production of Kenny Segal, with a slice-of-life rap from billy woods only appearing halfway through, while ELUCID's lines are buried in distorted noise and echoes... "Is it me?"

Cengiz Arslanpay & Michel Banabila - Stop The Genocide! End The Occupation Now [Tapu Records]
The title says it all: Stop The Genocide! End The Occupation Now. Dutch musician Michel Banabila and Netherlands-based Turkish musician Cengiz Arslanpay have created a beautiful work of electro-acoustic drone; both musicians work with all manner of instruments, and Arslanpay's ney flute and rebab can be heard here among the electronics. All proceeds go to Gaza / Lebanon relief funds, listed on the Bandcamp page.

Persher - Hymn To The Tupperbird [Thrill Jockey/Bandcamp]
The debut album from Persher follows their mini-album from 2022, Man With the Magic Soap. It's unlikely that anyone will sleep well to Sleep Well. Although both musicians come from the dubstep/techno world (Arthur Cayzer is Pariah and Jamie Roberts is Blawan), Persher is their tribute to grindcore, hardcore punk and extreme metal, with the bass elements only leaking in at times. I definitely hear them in "Hymn To The Tupperbird": weird sound manipulation, delay effects and occasional edited grooves lurk behind the guitar & bass riffs and the gruff metal vocals. Sleep Well is not for the faint-hearted, but fans of the heavy will find plenty to enjoy.

Squarepusher - Domelash [Warp/Bandcamp]
So. A new Squarepusher eh? *raises eyebrow* I dunno, but with all the new jungle out, and brilliant "deconstructed club" stuff melding jungle and techno and who knows what else, the drill'n'bass and electric bass on Tom Jenkinson feels a bit outdated. And yet... it's fun, he does love mashing the beats in ridiculous fashion, and he still has a handy way with synth melodies. I guess it's just that, as was mentioned way back when he & Aphex Twin and the rest started making this music, there's not much in the way of (sub) bass here (it was snarkily suggested at the time that they hadn't heard jungle played out in clubs, only in their bedrooms). It's all very much in the mid-range. Still, as I said, enjoyable stuff!

Arcane - Minotaur [Over/Shadow/Bandcamp]
Well here's one of those contemporary purveyors of jungle & drum'n'bass. Bristol's Arcane has a handful of releases under his belt on the likes of Irish label Rua Sound, but debuts now on Over/Shadow, founded to follow in the footsteps of the legendary Moving Shadow label. The Minotaur EP is four tracks of jungle re-tooled for the post-footwork age, with a nod to the hardcore techno that presaged jungle, but eyes forward to the future.

Andy Odysee - Waterblade Warrior [Odysee Recordings/Bandcamp]
Andy Baddaley, on the other hand, goes way back. An old schoolmate of Jim Baker of Source Direct, he joined Tilla Kemal's Odysee Recordings a few years in, lending his jazz & classical chops to the dark & deep sound. He's now co-manager of the label as it revives old releases by Source Direct, Photek and others, while also releasing new music - in particular from Badalley under Andy Odysee (fka Angel Dust, Cloaking Device and other aliases). Odysee Black Volume IV is the latest in a series of releases aimed at expanding the label's outlook, but Badalley's broad musical background always shines through anyway. "Waterblade Warrior" is an incredible exercise in programming skill, an updated take on Photek circa "Ni-Ten-Ichi-Ryu (Two Swords Technique)" which in all honesty should be on all the dancefloors.

Atrice - Multiplex [Ilian Tape/Bandcamp]
The latest release on Munich's singular Ilian Tape label brings Swiss duo Atrice back into the fold, with an EP that rivals their brilliant Ilian Tape debut Q from 2021. The five tracks on Multiplex span bass forms from breakbeat techno to jungle, always syncopating, always changing. Premium dancefloor stuff.

Morwell - Into the Light [Spiritual TransmissionsBandcamp]
Max Morwell takes a left turn from his usual post-rave/bass/breaks obsessions here - or does he? This is still music with beats, but it's super trippy, with somewhat psychedelic spoken word samples throughout, drawing from free jazz as much as jungle or trap. Morwell's first release on his new label Spiritual Transmissions, it comes in a limited CD form (tasty!) as well as digital, and the first two tracks are streaming now. Recommended.

gorse panshawe - tie me to the maypole [Activia Benz/Bandcamp]
The artist formerly(?) known as Slugabed has been bending his weirdness in other directions as gorse panshawe for a while now, via the Activia Benz label. So where Slugabed laid down wonky blurty bass music, gorse panshawe on earth, air, fire & water seems to go a'wandrin' into the English countryside, where he finds miniature raves happening in forests & streams, and jungle bidness around the maypole. "Pagan jungle"? Sure, why not!

Wrecked Lightship - Hex [Peak Oil/Bandcamp]
The second album from Wrecked Lightship, the duo of Laurie Appleblim Osborne and Adam Winchester, comes from Brian Foote & Brion Brionson's great, unpredictable Peak Oil label. As with 2022's Drowned Aquarium, these are submerged, dub-soaked jams, sometimes with jungle breaks half-audible through the murk. Fascinating, hard to grasp.

Bushranger - Ghost Gum Transmitter [Bush Meditation]
Eli Murray, best known as Gentleforce, has revived his Bushranger alias for an album of twisted field recordings and degraded techno. With Gully Music, Murray melds these two sources together so that you can't tell where the crickets end and the glitched hi-hats begin - although to be fair, there's a lot of imposing electronics here. But the project's aim to make music about - and for - specific places is artfully achieved. Perhaps Murray's greatest achievement is that he's made industrial music about nature. Hypnotic.

Scattered Order - It was a Saturday [Rather By Vinyl]
Scattered Order - The silent dark [Rather By Vinyl]
40+ years into their career (with some minor breaks), Sydney icons Scattered Order have released what to me sounds like easily one of their best albums. All Things Must Persist has a lot of their recent hallmarks: sampled TV or movie voices, razor-sharp guitars, intricate beats, but then also pretty contemplative piano... Mitch Jones' voice rasps over & under these arrangements. All three current members - Jones, Michael Tee and Shane Fahey - likely contribute electronic and instrumental sounds. You might think that they're at an age where no fucks need be given, but Scattered Order has never felt the need to nod to audience comfort or genre norms, slipping & sliding between (post-)industrial, postpunk, sound collage and studio experimentation, and various forms of electronica. It's all here, adorned with stunning artwork from Stella Severain. Get it on vinyl from Bandcamp or at one of their up-coming shows (see their website).

Sote - Reign of Insanity [SVBKVLT/Bandcamp]
Sote - Death-dealing [SVBKVLT/Bandcamp]
By this time, Ata Ebtekar's musical outlet as Sote should be familiar to fans of electronic/experimental music worldwide. It's over 2 decades since his Electric Deaf EP on Warp left listeners gasping for air, and for well over a decade he's been exploring Iranian musical traditions - including adptations of pioneering electronic music from the country, and ways of combining his electronics with Persian instruments like santour, tar and tombak - as well as promoting the work of new generations of Iranian experimental musicians through his Zabte Sote imprint. His latest album Ministry of Tall Tales comes via Shanghai's very internationalist, forward-thinking label SVBKVLT, and as the title implies, deals with misinformation/disinformation, corruption, oppression and so on, all familiar conditions in geopolitics at the moment. The music is not as abrasive as one might expect, however. While drama and anger creep in at times, the emotions expressed here tend more towards confusion and near-resignation, given a kind of resolution with "1401 Beautiful Souls", although even there it's hard to pinpoint whether it's sarcastic or not. Another powerful work from an electronic master.

Ludwig Wittbrodt - Tulpen [Ana Ott/Bandcamp]
The duo of Edis Ludwig and Emily Wittbrodt pairs two musicians from different musical worlds, intersecting in experimentation. Ludwig is a drummer in rock bands and an electronic producer, here on laptop and occasional drums. Wittbrodt is a cellist with a classical background who also works in free improv - last year we heard her unconventional suite Make You Stay, also released by Ana Ott, with a mixture of songs, classical compositions and free jazz - and electronics. For Schleifen ("Grind") the cello and laptop become a mini-ensemble, capable of producing contemporary classical music, drones, and kosmische musik, within a consistent framework. Lovely stuff.

sinonó - qué estará pensando [Subtext Recordings/Bandcamp]
Latinx vocalist Isabel Crespo Pardo lives in New York, where they work with various ensembles in new music and free improv. Their main outlet for their own compositions is sinonó, which pairs their voice with powerhouse cellist Lester St. Louis and double bassist Henry Fraser. This combination of low string instruments makes for powerful and moving music, with haunting melodic lines sometimes played in high harmonics on the contrabass, storms of plucking or tremolo bowing, basslines from either instrumentalist. Crespo's songs patiently unfold, with plenty of room for the musicians to improvise, but with the scaffolding of a bassline here, a strummed chord there, to hold Crespo's beautiful vocal melodies. There are moments of intense discordance, which only emphasise the warmth of the simple-yet-complex arrangements. This may be the first fully acoustic album released on Subtext Recordings, although the recording is sensitively mixed by electronic musician and Subtext boss James Ginzburg (of emptyset). A deeply touching suite of what the composer calls poem-songs.

Oliver Coates - Timp X [Invada/Bandcamp]
TV audiences have just been introduced to the period comedy/dramedy(?) Mary & George, starring Julieanne Moore. Sounds like fun, but what it sounds like is also heavily influenced by British cellist/composer/producer Oliver Coates, who was - fortunately - commissioned to write the score. Coates is comfortable in contemporary classical circles, but has also worked with bands such as Radiohead, Mira Calix, Mica Levi, Leo Abrahams, Clark, MF DOOM and more. He also recently soundtracked the much-celebrated Aftersun. Just before this UFog episode went to air, Invada snuck out a couple of tracks from the Mary & George soundtrack on Bandcamp - but now the entire 2hrs of cues is available, and the previews suggest it'll be sumptuous, smart and a little avant-garde. Can't wait to dive in to the rest!

We Will Intersect - Fragment III [Ugoki!/Bandcamp]
Sydney pianist, keyboard player, composer & improviser Adrian Lim-Klumpes is best known for Triosk and the band we share, Tangents, but he recently convened a new quartet with another unusual line-up, with Microfiche's Nick Calligeros on trumpet & live electronics, Nick Meredith aka Kcin on percussion & live electronics, and Miles Thomas on drums. Their debut self-titled album was released on Belgian label Off, an offshoot of the experimental Stilll label, and new EP Fragments comes via Ugoki!, now the main home for Off's jazz releases. The music is all derived from live improvisations, edited by Lim-Klumpes & Calligeros into four song-length Fragments, which progress from soft drones and tentative piano to, ultimately, the very processed & percussive fourth fragment. Those who've enjoyed these musicians in other contexts, or are interested in Australian improv and electronics, will no doubt enjoy.

Mattia Onori - Spazio Profondo [Southern Lights/Bandcamp]
Out on Friday March 15th from Naarm/Melbourn label Southern Lights is the debut solo album from Berlin-based Italian musician Mattia Onori, who co-runs the Melantónia Collective in Berlin. Tra Vento E Oscurità is an album of sound-art at its most pristine and austere - speech processed into unintelligibility, breath and wind, resonant drones, and perhaps the occasional synth pad floating through these soundscapes. Onori's got a deft touch with organised sound, and takes us deep into the space "Between Wind and Darkness".

Tom Allum - Ø [Tom Allum Bandcamp]
A couple of years ago, I was very impressed by the watery electronics of Western Australian sound-artist Tom Allum on the CANAL ROCKS album released by Boorloo/Perth label Tone List. On his own Bandcamp, Allum has just released Out of Hand, featuring four tracks created for an exhibition by Allum and visual artist & architect Beth George. Drawing machines interact with the sound, and vice versa. Even on its own, the music is immersive, with sounds generated by wavetable synthesis coexisting with recordings of the objects in the space, placed and moving about the stereo soundstage. It makes for gorgeous listening, with the intimacy both of synthesised sounds and of objects in a room, slowly teasing out microscopic melodies and drawn-out rhythms. Listen anywhere, anytime, but consider putting headphones on and turning out the lights.

Ben Frost - Unreal in the Eyes of the Dead [Mute/Bandcamp]
Utility Fog's connection with Iceland-based Aussie composer Ben Frost goes back to the very early days, before Ben left Adelaide and then left Melbourne & Australia altogether (well, he's visited since then). His album By The Throat was UFog's album of the year in 2009. Following his debut on Iceland's Bedroom Community, Theory of Machines, it established Frost as a composer, as well as a master of snarling electronic bass sonics. His latest album Scope Neglect traces a line back to Theory of Machines' sampling of Swans, if not earlier to his Melbourne postrock band School of Emotional Engineering. Guitar riffs and ambient electronics are the scope of Scope Neglect, but here it's metal riffs pared down to their essence and turned machine-like. It can be almost too austere, with none of metal's barely controlled ferocity - not that this isn't deliberate. But I found myself most drawn to the album's final track, in which the riffs have been banished underground, or in the next valley over, leaving the listener with echoes and desolation. There's beauty in that.

Listen again — ~200MB

Sunday, 25th of February, 2024

Oddly tonight we have a bit more weird-ass rock stuff than usual, and garage jazz, and... post-jazz? But also breakcore and lots of jungle/drum'n'bass influences in some more experimental settings, as well as some mesmerising pump organ and voice.

LISTEN AGAIN, don't be scared! Stream on demand on FBi's website, podcast here.

Kim Myhr & Kitchen Orchestra - V [Sofa Music/Bandcamp]
Kim Myhr & Kitchen Orchestra - VI [Sofa Music/Bandcamp]
I've been a fan of Norwegian guitarist Kim Myhr for many years. He's a distinctive guitarist but also an excellent composer & orchestrator - he's recorded with the Trondheim Jazz Orchestra and the Australian Art Orchestra, neither of which are typical orchestras, made up as they are of talented improvising musicians (and both with flexible lineups). The "Kitchen Orchestra" credited on his new album Hereafter is based in Stavanger, a city in the south of Norway, again a versatile group of musicians from jazz, classical and other contexts: there's a horn section and strings, two of whom play electric bass and electric guitar as well as double bass, a drummer, and then there are musicians credited to synthesizers & organ, voice and cassette player, and laptop. And Myhr plays drum machine, various keyboards and contributes voice as well as his guitar. As usual these are beautiful, rich arrangements, with jazz at their heart but drawing on Indian ragas, postrock and electronica, krautrock and glitch. The roman-numbered sections flow one to another, taking the listener through a meditation on mortality and transience.

fire! - the dark inside of cabbage [Rune Grammofon]
Testament, the latest album from Swedish free jazz powerhouse Fire!, is their first to only feature the core trio, playing their core instruments. Over the years the band has made albums with various experimental music legends - Jim O'Rourke, Oren Ambarchi and more - as well as convening the incredible Fire! Orchestra with Scandinavian jazz musicians aplenty and a group of brilliant vocalists. Here, recorded by the one & only Steve Albini, they've taken the Albini approach of stripping down to basics, recording material live to tape. And these three are masters for sure: Mats Gustafsson making his saxophone squeal and squall and sob in the way of Peter Brötzmann but very much his own; Johan Berthling and Andreas Werliin being rhythm section to die for, holding down krautrockish grooves and riffs in tight lockstep. Hypnotic and exhilarating.

The Body & Dis Fig - Eternal Hours [Thrill Jockey/Bandcamp]
The Body & Dis Fig - Dissent, Shame [Thrill Jockey/Bandcamp]
A considerable part of The Body's career has been collaborations - so much so that 2021's I've Seen All I Need To See, with not a single guest and just guitar/drums/vox, was a sharp surprise. I first heard Felicia Chen's astonishing work as Dis Fig on her solo album Purge, linking her operatically-trained voice with industrial and noise music, but her collaboration with The Bug, In Blue, rightly brought her further notoriety. Orchards of a Futile Heaven is a suitably horrifying and moving piece of work, not a departure for either artist but a perfect synthesis. Rhythmic noise sputters into noisescapes of guitar or electronics; Chip King's high-pitched squeals lurk within, but Chen's voice can scream as much as sing melodies or provide a multitracked choir; Lee Buford's programmed and live drums thunder; but you really can't tell at any point who's responsible for instruments or production, and that's great. It's some of the best material from either act.

Hatis Noit - Jomon (Preservation Rework) feat. Armand Hammer [Erased Tapes/Bandcamp]
London-based Japanese singer Hatis Noit released a remarkable vocal-only album on Erased Tapes in 2022. But prior to that, she'd released music in Japan that married her self-schooled but powerful vocal techniques with electronics. So it's not too surprising to see Erased Tapes trickling out some remixes of Aura. Best so far is from seasoned underground hip-hop producer Preservation, who preserves much of the original "Jomon" but along with the controlled beats & bass invites billy woods & ELUCID aka Armand Hammer to add their own voices. They're masters of fitting in with strange music of course.

Sleepytime Gorilla Museum - Silverfish [Avant Night/Bandcamp]
Sleepytime Gorilla Museum - S.P.Q.R. [Avant Night/Bandcamp]
I would never have expected that in 2024 I would be playing the new Sleepytime Gorilla Museum on this show. After all, their third (and previously last) album In Glorious Times came out in 2007. But last year the band setup a Bandcamp and hinted at the long-rumoured album of the Last Human Being was on its way. During the long gap, I followed the work of violinist/singer Carla Kihlstedt (of whom I've been a longtime fan) and percussionist/drummer/etc Matthias Bossi in their Rabbit Rabbit Radio project, and that's where I first heard "Silverfish", under the name "Paper Prison". Kihlstedt's double-stopped violin refrain is insanely brilliant, as is her songwriting, and it's great hearing it with SGM, as it was always intended. The band's strength is that the jazz/classical aspects fit seamlessly with the theatrical metal & prog, but even with all of that, it's a surprise to find a cover of This Heat here - but maybe it shouldn't be, as a band that bridges late-period political art rock and punk/post-punk. "S.P.Q.R" is one of my favourite of Charles Hayward's songs (admittedly there are a lot), and the breakneck, heavy rendition here pretty much does it justice.

Sergeant Bestfriend - molehills out of mountains [200+]
Df0bad - Vichysois [200+]
Breakcore was always central to Utility Fog's mission from the start in 2003. At the time breakcore and ragga jungle were keeping the faith for rapid drumbreak destruction, and I always enjoyed the fuck-you illegal sampling and marrying of ugliness with - well, often - prettiness. Breakcore never died, but I feel that with the all-powerful jungle resurgence, it's getting a bit more prominence too. Eora/Sydney's own 200+ are dedicated to all things ultra-fast rave, and also carry on the anarchist political ideals that often came with this kind of hardcore music. So from the river to the sea and the sea of blood between is an impassioned protest against Israel's increasingly undisguised fascism (while emphasising that anti-Zionism is not antisemitism). It's also a great compilation of breakcore, gabber and hardcore techno from Sydney and across the country. Naarm's Sergeant Bestfriend gives us fun, melodic drill'n'bass, while Sydney's Df0bad brings us a journey through IDM.

ophélie - Pipa Pipa [hundert/Bandcamp]
French DJ based in Berlin ophélie drops their debut EP on the Hamburg label hundert here. Two tracks influenced by drum'n'bass & dubstep as much as IDM - the halftime/jungle feel here is reminiscent of the mid-'90s like Subtropic's Homebrew. Lushly melodic with intricate programming and bassweight, a sign of great stuff to come.

POD - Trip2Fantasia [Kinetic Vision]
POD & Tamen - Subvert [Straight Up Breakbeat/Bandcamp]
Last week I played a track from Naarm/Melbourne's POD, an alias of JXTPS for bass genres. Spacer is out on Kinetic Vision now, and "Trip2Fantasia" is even more jungle-influenced, albeit in a bass-techno context. But POD has also been collaborating with Naarm-based jungle mastermind Tamen, and one track from their forthcoming EP is available Finnish label Straight Up Breakbeat's Zero Four compilation - absolutely wikkid.

Source Direct - A Different Groove (T-Mirage V.I.P.) [Odysee Recordings/Bandcamp]
Odysee Recordings go way back to the early jungle days, but relaunched a while back to bring back material from the label's artists as well as excellent new recordings from label-head Andy Odysee and others. One of the strengths of their catalogue is a long relationship with jungle/d'n'b legend Source Direct (an old school friend of Andy Odysee's), so the label has been gradually drip-feeding remastered Source Direct tracks with some new remixes. The brilliant '95 tune Stars is remastered here along with a stompin' remix from Finnish master Fanu, but the also excellent b-side "A Different Groove" appears as a V.I.P. from T-Mirage aka Tilla Kemal, the label's founder and collaborator for Source Direct's Jim Baker. Continues the classy, dark & sharp quality from Odysee.

Alan Fitzpatrick & Reset Robot - Mule Subjective [Shall Not Fade]
Techno bigwig Alan Fitzpatrick here appears on Shall Not Fade with the Headphone Lullaby EP, exchanging high energy 4/4 kicks for breakbeats and bass syncopation. It's lovely and more than a little epic, but I was drawn to the collab with Reset Robot on a jungle/halftime tip.

re:ni - Blame is the Name of the Game [Timedance/Bandcamp]
Following an excellent debut on Ilian Tape, UK DJ Lauren Bush aka re:ni drops four tracks of techno/bass/breaks on Batu's Timedance. Suffused with dub bass and atmospherics, it's music for discerning dancefloors everywhere.

Lord Spikeheart - REM FODDER ft. James Ginzburg, Koenraad Ecker [HAEKALU]
Back in 2020 Nyege Nyege Tapes unleashed the intensity that was the self-titled album by Kenyan noise metal/grindcoreinfused duo Duma. Now Duma's incendiary singer Lord Spikeheart is launching his HAEKALU label with The Adept on April 19th, with a full house of experimental producers and collaborators throughout. "REM FODDER" brings both James Ginzburg of Subtext Recordings & emptyset and Koenraad Ecker of Lumisokea & Stray Dogs, with jackhammering beats, heavy bass and Spikeheart's voice fed through reverberating delays. Clearly the whole album is going to be intense as fuck.

aya - Dexxy Is A Midnight Runner [YCO]
Lip Flip is 4-track EP from aya to raise money for her Facial Feminisation Surgery. But basically it's four tracks of her typically savvy, well-produced deconstructed bass music - recommended!

Alan Johnson - Portal [YUKU]
We had Alan Fitzpatrick earlier, but Alan Johnson isn't a person at all - they're a duo. Between 2013 and 2020 they released just three EPs, but both 2022 and 2023 gave us excellent four-track EPs on Sneaker Social Club. They now find themselves on YUKU, a label whose aesthetic is not that dissimilar to SSC, but tends to take the bass & breaks into more experimental territory - which is reflected in the 6 tracks on Glory Days, their longest release yet. Like the Stillness EP's sampling of Bro. Samuel Clayton with Count Ossie's orchestra, Glory Days uses Jamaican voices through various tracks, and the dub side of bass music is strong, as is the sense of space.

Terminal 11 - Racing To Nowhere [Opal Tapes]
Since the early 2000s, Michael Castaneda has been making idiosyncratic breakcore as Terminal 11. It might initially seem odd finding his latest album Suffocating Repetition on Opal Tapes, a label better known for techno, industrial and noise, but they're not so far away from breakcore anyway, and as usual it's arguable whether that genre fits here. But yes, it's full of dense electronic textures and crowded, restless rhythms. As the album title may imply, it was written during and about the Covid lockdown times, and it really does evoke some of that anxiety-inducing homogeneity...

Lachlan R. Dale - Revealing a silver stream feat. Bonniesongs, Joseph Rabjohns [Art As Catharsis/Bandcamp]
It's been a long time coming, but Art As Catharsis boss (and my colleague in Black Aleph) Lachlan R. Dale will release his ambitious collaborative album Shrines in April. Every track is structured around contributions from musical friends from around the country, each a very distinctive musician themself, reacting to some initial loops from Lachlan. I suspect most of the responses were fairly abstract too, and Lachlan then de- and re-constructed the material into these final pieces. Speaking for my own, it's quite a lovely feeling hearing something that's almost entirely unfamiliar but clearly has me in there - so hopefully that goes for everyone else. On the first single, multi-instrumentalist Bonniesongs' voice and guitar are stretched into ambient textures, as is the guitar of Queensland's Joseph Rabjohns. Keep an eye/ear out for further extracts!

FUJI||||||||||TA - M-3 [Hallow Ground/Bandcamp]
One of the unquestionable highlights of last year's Volume Festival at the Art Gallery of NSW was the performance in The Tank (a cavernous underground space) by Japanese minimalist FUJI||||||||||TA. Yosuke Fujita played various self-made instruments including bells and pump organ, as well as projecting his voice into the space. Whether with his carefully-made field recordings or gorgeously close-mic'd instrumental recordings, Fujita's recordings are unfailingly absorbing. I was introduced to his work in 2020 when Swiss label Hallow Ground released the astonishing iki, fragile recordings of his pump organ, wheezing and clunking through unusual harmonies and discords. His second album for Hallow Ground, MMM, begins with a slow-evolving drone of that pump organ, with the air now pumped electrically, freeing Fujita to generate strange sonic shifts by moving his microphone around it. The second track is built from his remarkable extended vocal technique, breathing in and out in a way that creates a "third voice" from the interference patterns. It's very eerie. But tonight we hear the third track, which combines these two elements into something different again - as if the warbling sounds of organ and voice again generate some spectral Other. It's minimalism as always intended - seemingly static, but ever-changing. Masterful. Mmm.

Listen again — ~212MB

Sunday, 18th of February, 2024

We have wonderful Indigeonous/classical/experimental crossover, weird electronic pop & hip-hop, noise, sound-art, Middle Eastern beats, jungle/bass/dubstep, hyper-shoegaze, contemporary cello, ambient and more. Listen and enjoy.

LISTEN AGAIN to the re-listenable. Podcast here, stream on demand there @ FBi.

Yirinda - Guyu (Fish) [Chapter Music/Bandcamp]
Yirinda - Yunma (Sleep) [Chapter Music/Bandcamp]
Well, the self-titled album from Yirinda is out, and it's everything it promised to be. I got to see the duo of Butchulla songman Fred Leone and double-bassist/composer Samuel Pankhurst at the Woodford Folk Festival across the new year, performing with an ensemble of strings, horns and keyboards. It's a magical combination of Leone's songlines and Pankhurst's arrangements, creating something that I'm pretty sure has never existed before. On the album, strings and horns augment Pankhurst's double bass, and some contemporary electronics mix seamlessly in (I note Marly Lüske aka Tidy Kid co-engineered the album). But descriptions can't really do it justice - Leone's absorbing vocals fit perfectly with wonderful contemporary music. They are playing at a FREE Sunday show at White Bay Power Station for the Biennale of Sydney/Phoenix Central Park on March 10th - 2:30 to 6pm.

Marcus Whale - Borders [Blue Void]
Incoming on March 8th is the new album from Marcus Whale, storied Utility Fog associate since his mid-teens, multi-instrumentalist, multi-genreist, singer and queer icon. Ecstasy is the first album on his new Blue Void imprint/label/thing (his long-defunct 3" CD-R label released my first solo EP back in the ancient of days). Here "ecstasy" refers to the pleasure of transcending the self, of being drawn, as he says, to the void. Once again Marcus is combining pop and club electronics with influences from classical and avant-garde/experimental music, and it is Very Good.

Teether - Elbow Grease [CONTENT.NET.AU/Bandcamp]
Teether - Chrysalis (ft. Stoneset) [CONTENT.NET.AU/Bandcamp]
Early last year Melbourne underground rapper Teether released an incredible album through Chapter Music with producer Kuya Neil. But with It Must Be Strange to Not Have Lived, released on Kuya Neil (Neil Cabatingan)'s CONTENT.NET.AU, Teether returns to self-production, comfortably sauntering through indie r'n'b, sample-based downtempo beats and nods to jungle (featuring Stoneset), postpunk (working with Nerdie) and more. It's all gold, all adorned with Teether's effortlessly laconic flow.

Shit and Shine - Livid After Midnight [Antibody label]
Shit and Shine - Jogging In Jeans [Antibody label]
Wait, didn't we just hear from Craig Clouse's Shit and Shine a couple of weeks ago? We did! Joy Of Joys was a collection of strange sound-experiments; now, Masters Of All This Hell comes via the Belgian Antibody Label with a collection of experimental electronic beats and noises that reminds me most of Clouse's two great albums for Editions Mego in 2015 and 2017 - bare-bones weirdbeat shit made on drum machines and samplers, with a kind of perverse funk to them.

Philippe Petit - Within the Corridors of Hell... [Crónica/Bandcamp]
The "musical travel agent" Philippe Petit has performed various roles in the experimental music world for some decades. In the early 2000s he ran a label called BiP_HOp releasing a range of electronic albums as well as some fabulously-curated BiP_HOp Generation compilations featuring the likes of pimmon, Arovane, B.Fleischmann, Scanner, Pan Sonic's Ilpo Väisänen, Murcof and Adrian Lim-Klumpes. He's also presented various radio shows since the 1980s. And full disclosure: a decade ago(!) Philippe & I collaborated on a track - as collaborative musicians and radio presenters in this space, it was inevitable. For at least that decade's time, Philippe has been working with non-musical sound generators feeding into modular synths, creating weirdly organic squalls and slides and throbs out of physical gestures, but also making use of digital editing. These techniques are all there in his latest epic, a 2CD journey into Dante & Doré's vision of hell called A Divine Comedy. I particularly love the disturbed vocal samples in "Within the Corridors of Hell...", interacting with these audio gestures.

Andrea Belfi plays Robert Wyatt - Dondestan [Stray Signals]
Noumeno - In Spirit [Stray Signals]
As the situation in Gaza only gets worse, a problematic situation in Germany - particularly Berlin - is also getting worse, whereby any voices in support of Palestine are being branded as antisemitic, and are systematically silenced - even when they are Jewish. There couldn't be a more irony-laden illustration of the weaponising of "antisemitism" to shield Israel from scrutiny than German authorities feeling empowered to shut down Jewish self-expression. This is the background for the compilation Dedicated To Palestine from Berlin-based Stray Signals, which will donate all revenue to two German-based NGOs, Jüdische Stimme für gerechten Frieden in Nahost (Jewish Voice for Just Peace in the Middle East) and Palästina Kampagne. Among the artists featured as Emanuele Porcinai's WSR, who we featured a few times here last year, Planet µ artist Herva, Berlin-based Lebanese musician & DJ Jessika Khazrik and many others. It's a varied collection of electronic and electroacoustic work from across the Berlin scene. A revelation is Andrea Belfi's cover of "Dondestan", a beautiful fable of Palestine from 1991 by the committed leftist and (like Belfi) drummer Robert Wyatt, rich with instrumentation in support of Belfi's fragile, rarely-heard vocals. To contrast, I played some frosty ambient techno from Italian producer Noumeno.

Use Knife - Coupe d'état (Muqata'a مقاطعة remix) [Morphine Records/Bandcamp]
Belgian/Iraqi trio Use Knife combine Arabic percussion and vocals with psychedelic electronics of all sorts. They released their debut album The Shedding of Skin in 2022, and now Berlin label Morphine Records (run by Lebanese musician Rabih Beaini) is releasing a 3-track remix EP, Peace Carnival with reworkings by Zoë Mc Pherson, Beaini and brilliant Palestinian producer Muqata'a مقاطعة. "Coupe d'état" is a pun on "coup d'état", but "coupe" means "cut" (which you Use a Knife for). On Muqata'a's remix, percussion and a driving synth line are punctuated by shouted vocals, bass hits and glitches.

Chewlie - Run [YUKU/Bandcamp]
Swiss producer Julia Häller is Chewlie, whose last release was the Diagon EP for BRUK, one of the labels run by Low End Activist (also of Sneaker Social Club). Now she's back on YUKU with eight more tracks of IDMish bass music and sound design. Chewlie fits with current trends in deconstructed club and experimental bass music, but she has her own approach - there's a lightness to the sounds, not leaning so much on LOUD bass distortion and sudden shifts, but rather on glitchy, skittery beats and syncopations, body-moving, other than a couple of beatless tracks. Top tier sounds.

POD - Anteloper [Kinetic Vision]
A new project for Melbourne techno producer JXTPS aka Wu Kush, POD finds him in bass mode, with dubstep and jungle influences aplenty. Notably, POD has a proper d'n'b EP coming from SUBB later this year - a collaboration with Tamen, one track available here. "Anteloper" seems like dub techno, but as the beats get caught up in syncopating delays, hints of jungle can be heard.

Earl Grey - Prussia Dub [Rua Sound]
Jim Ehlinger aka Earl Grey has been making drum'n'bass & jungle for over a decade now, appearing on labels like Limerick's Subtle Audio, who were advancing jungle/drumfunk ages back. Another Irish label, Rua Sound has just put out the excellent Death Rattle EP from Earl Grey, with nimble break work, equally nimble basslines and dark pads. It's cinematic and unpredictable, first class.

Liquid DnB-Like Ambient Grime 2 - '06 Dubstep Mix [Sneaker Social Club]
Luke J Murray has spread his idiosyncratic take on UK bass music across pseudonyms and collabs like Iceman Junglist Kru, 1-800-ICEMAN, Roadman DSP, and notably the ambient isolationism of Stonecirclesampler. So it's not surprising that the four tracks on the eponymous Liquid DnB-Like Ambient Grime 2 are rather unorthodox takes on the four genres name-checked (garage, dubstep, techno, grime). Each track is ostensible a remix of "Liquid DnB-like Ambient Grime 2", which names the EP and the artist, with pitched-down vocal samples and, on two of the tracks, massively distorted amen breaks clattering in at entirely the wrong tempo. This wrong-footing is of course part of the aesthetic itself. You'd be unlikely to hear these tunes in a club, but as a kind of hauntological celebration of UK bass music they're pretty brilliant. I'll take this over Burial any day.

Kim Gordon - I'm A Man [Matador]
When Kim Gordon came out with her first solo album in 2019, 8 years after Sonic Youth broke up due to her husband Thurston Moore's infidelity, and some 4 decades after the beginning of her musical career, it was a revelation. As bassist and one of the singers in SY, she has played a huge part in experimental, punk/postpunk and indie rock music for decades. And then No Home Record came along, showing an artist still unwilling to do the expected, working with pop producer Justin Raisen to create distorted beats and electronic noise merging with the guitars, a beautifully messed-up accompaniment to that familiar voice. It looks like The Collective is going to continue that aesthetic. It's the punk of the 2020s, uncompromising as ever. For tonight, here's "I'm A Man" eviscerating entitled nobody-men.

clust.r - brood [business casual]
clust.r - leather [business casual]
Who is clust.r? Nobody knows (this is absolutely a lie). They released their self-titled album clust.r on Retrac Recordings in 2022, and Business Casual have just released the follow-up ever chance. Like much of the output of these labels, there's more than a nod to the indietronic breakcoreriffic days of Tigerbeat6, Planet µ circa mid-'00s - it's lo-fi glitch-pop, shoegaze-breakcore, compressed to buggery, distorted electronics and enthusiastic, unschooled vocals from various of clust.r's friends ("river" is rkgk of bagel fanclub, and that duo's other half co-produces a track here as SLUTPUNK!). Anyway, it's intense, joyful and all that other stuff - I think you'll like it.

Other Joe - dreaming out loud [Other Joe Bandcamp]
Naarm/Melbourne's Joseph Buchan runs the legendary .jpeg Artefacts label with impeccable taste, but he's also known to make varied music as Other Joe - something I wish he'd do more of (at least in recorded form)! For Valentine's Day he put out a two-track single called one billion kisses, which is a lot of kisses, but I mean go for it. This is the "b-side": both are beautiful hypnotic pieces with whispering, whistling pads and clicky, head-nodding beats, finishing with jazzy, bell-like Rhodes chords.

Adriaan de Roover - Homebound [Dauw]
Adriaan de Roover - Yet [Dauw]
Belgian sound-artist Adriaan de Roover joins Ghent-based label Dauw for the second time with Other Rooms. I'm reluctant to call this ambient - there's quasi-rhythmic movement going on throughout, and melodies that emerge out of exquisite sound-design. This is wholly absorbing music, sometimes unsettling, that I can't recommend highly enough.

India Gailey - Nicole Lizée - Grotesquerie [people | places | records]
India Gailey - Thanya Iyer - Where I can be as big as the Sun [people | places | records]
Their second album Problematica finds Canadian cellist India Gailey performing seven compositions that I believe were specifically commissioned for them and for this album. Gailey is a composer herself - her own composition on her equally uncategorisable debut album was a highlight, but she is also a first-class interpreter of others' compositions, using her cello to its full extent along with her voice on many of these tracks, and electronics on some as well. There's a lot going on in the tracks here - don't think of it as classical music! Andrew Noseworthy's composition "GomL_V7FinalMix_LessVox_MoreVerb_ Dec13_MASTERED_48k24b_FINAL.wav", created in collaboration with Gailey, wraps cellistic extended techniques in granular processing and shoegazey noise, for instance. On the other hand, some composers invite Gailey to perform expressive songs on cello and voice: the closing piece "Where I can be as big as the Sun" by Thanya Iyer accompanies a deceptively straightforward vocal melody with plucked cello. It's gorgeous. Meanwhile, renowned Canadian composer Nicole Lizée invites Gailey to send short cello phrases and whispered or shouted voice through delay effects, charmingly and a little disturbingly disorienting.

IKSRE - ripples [Constellation Tatsu/Bandcamp]
Naarm-based musician Phoebe Dubar has released five albums now as IKSRE, on various international and local labels. This month, Oakland's Constellation Tatsu released Abundance, as usual featuring ambient electronics and vocals, with subtle beats at times, very much influenced by Dubar's practice in sound healing. It's music to dive into, as there's a lot of detail. Dubar will be launching this album in Sydney on April 6th at Fatamorgana in Alexandria.

Aviva Endean - What Calls in the Quiet (Moths & Stars live set) EXCERPT I [FRIM Records]
Aviva Endean - What Calls in the Quiet (Moths & Stars live set) EXCERPT II [FRIM Records]
Naarm clarinettist and sound-artist Aviva Endean released her first solo album cinder : ember : ashes on Norwegian jazz/improv/experimental label SOFA in 2018, and the incredible Moths & Stars on Room40 in 2022. Now we're back in Scandinavia, with a split release on Sweden's FRIM Records documenting a performance at Rönnells Antikvariat in Stockholm, recorded by Aussie ex-pat John Chantler. I should note Henrik Olsson's beautiful abstract turntable manipulation as the other half of the record, but Endean's set adapts Moths & Stars' close-mic'd exploration of sounds from clarinets and other objects to a live set. The sound quality is remarkable, as if carefully recorded in a studio, scrabbling and bubbling across the stereo soundstage, sounds mostly made with breath, layered into gorgeous harmonies or strange assemblages of flitters and sighs. The full performances are over 30 minutes each, and worth every minute.

Listen again — ~209MB

Sunday, 11th of February, 2024

Sad news came today of the death of Damo Suzuki, the most recognizable vocalist of Can, and globetrotting vocal improvisor. Following some Can, we've got post- & contemporary jazz, gothic & industrial electronics, post-junglisms, idm, folktronica, drone and more.

LISTEN AGAIN to all the jewels within! Stream on demand on FBi's website, podcast here.

Can - Vitamin C [Mute]
Can - Mushroom [Mute]
Damo Suzuki was only the vocalist in Can for 3 years, from 1971 to 1973. But in that time his distinctive improvised vocals, sung in no language or all languages, adorned many of Can's best-loved songs, including the two groundbreaking albums Tago Mago and Ege Bamyasi. Can was the kind of group where every member was an essential part of the idiosyncratic music created, and so Suzuki's yelled, muttered, and sometimes sung vocals are integral to the sound of Can and the sound of their particular brand of krautrock. When Suzuki returned to performing after a period as a Jehovah's Witness(!), he began touring the world, performing his freeform vocals with local musicians, reproducing some of the thrill of Can's all-consuming semi- (or wholly-)improvised gigs for people everywhere - and forming the Damo Suzuki Network. Having been diagnosed with colon cancer first at only 33 years old, but survived it then, he was again diagnosed in 2014, given 10% chance of survival. So the world can count itself lucky to have gotten another 10 years from him.

Koma Saxo with Sofia Jernberg - Croydon Koma [We Jazz Records]
I'm not sure when I first came across the Finnish label We Jazz Records, but they made an impression in 2022 when they commissioned Carl Stone to remix their entire catalogue with We Jazz Reworks Vol. 2. The release I'm playing next was cause for my latest exploration of their releases, but Koma West from double bassist Petter Eldh's project Koma Saxo, this one featuring fellow Swede and brilliant vocalist Sofia Jernberg, was instantly striking. Eldh's compositions are avant-garde but still catchy, with strong orchestrations for strings, horns, piano and drums (and Eldh's mother Kiki on accordion!) and as well as Jernberg, who elevates everything she's involved with, this album features versatile cellist Lucy Railton and composer/improviser/organist Kit Downes on piano. In the end, though, it was the clattering drums of Christian Lillinger that gave this 2022 album the prime slot after Can!

divr - As Of Now [We Jazz Records]
divr - Echo's Answer [We Jazz Records]
From Sweden to Switzerland (again via the Finnish We Jazz), the new album from Swiss jazz piano trio divr, Is This Water, is a thing of beauty and wonder. They range from delicate beauty to post-bop intensity at times, incorporating snippets of field recordings and sound manipulation courtesy of Dan Nicholls which give the music an other-worldly uncanniness. There are three covers out of nine tracks: a jazz standard, Radiohead's "All I Need", and a gorgeous rendition of the lovely "Echo's Answer" by Broadcast. This is complex and deep music that's still rewarding for all.

Teiku - Psalm 113-114 [577 Records/Bandcamp]
Here's the first single from a new jazz group with a unique take on what was called "Radical Jewish Culture" when John Zorn started highlighting the avant-garde music of the Downtown New York scene in the 1990s. Here, pianist Josh Harlow and drummer Jonathan Barahal Taylor explore and recontextualise their ancestral music as sung at Passover Seders, inherited from their families' roots in Ukraine (my mother's ancestry is also Jewish-Ukrainian as it happens, although we never learnt these songs). Recordings of these liturgical songs are directly incorporated into the recordings, juxtaposed with fiery playing from Harlow and Taylor along with Jaribu Shahid's double bass, horns from Peter Formanek and Rafael Leafar, and electronics from various members. It's quite striking and powerful. The two bandleaders write of the band's music: "As its humble stewards we offer it as a call for justice for all oppressed peoples; as Jews, we decry the senseless violence, displacement, and killing perpetrated in our name." Co-signed.

Ryan Teague - Unbound [Bigo & Twigetti/Bandcamp]
Since 2005, Bristol composer & multi-instrumentalist Ryan Teague has blurred the boundaries between electronic music and classical composition. For post/neo-classical label Bigo & Twigetti his upcoming album Pattern Recognition is in some ways his most electronic, with synth patterns and beats rubbing shoulders with sampled classical arrangements on acoustic instruments. I can tell you the rest of the album is well worth the wait, released on March 22nd.

Chelsea Wolfe - Tunnel Lights [Loma Vista/Bandcamp]
Chelsea Wolfe - Whispers in the Echo Chamber [Loma Vista/Bandcamp]
For 14+ years and over a dozen albums, Chelsea Wolfe has combined her love of heavy metal with gothic folk and, increasingly, electronics, and an undeniable ear for great songwriting. On She Reaches Out To She Reaches Out To She, Wolfe and longtime musical partner Ben Chisholm conjure songs that can move between shoegaze, darkwave, folk and industrial metal. It's really good.

Yuko Araki - ‡Otiron (Portal Remix) [Room40/Bandcamp]
Yuko Araki - ‡Magnetar (Jonathan Snipes Remix) [Room40/Bandcamp]
Last year, Yuko Araki released IV, an incredible album of industrial noise, beats and exotic samples, a highlight of the year for me. She invited a number of musicians to remix two of the tracks from the album, ‡Magnetar and ‡Otiron, starting with Jonathan Snipes of clipping., who takes the ritualistic vocal samples and crunchy beats and gives them more of a club-ready makeover. Perhaps the most audacious choice was Australian extreme metal band Portal, who drench those vocal samples in distortion and general ugliness. Great stuff!

Gantz - howidowhatyoudoisnotwhatiwoulddowhatyoudoyetido [Gantz Bandcamp]
For his first EP of 2024, Turkish post-dubstepper seems to have given up on titles. untitled EP features such tracks as "variations on a drum loop" and "livetakeone". Mostly they are indeed variations on drum loops, mulched up in Gantz's machinery but retaining just enough funk.

Ivy Lab - Look Away [Sneaker Social Club/Bandcamp]
Having started out making drum'n'bass as Sabre and Stray, Gove Kidao and Jonathan Fogel teamed up almost 10 years ago as Ivy Lab, mostly putting out half-time and hip-hop-paced music. Last year they started veering back towards drum'n'bass and jungle, and they arrive on Sneaker Social Club with a mélange of UK bass styles, break-juggling at various tempos. It's bass music, not quite jungle, not quite what's going on in drum'n'bass at the moment, but 100% quality.

Gremlinz & Jesta - Big White [Metalheadz/Bandcamp]
Gremlinz & Jesta - All 7 [Metalheadz/Bandcamp]
Following numerous 12"s on Metalheadz as well Gremlinz' UVB-76 and DROOGS labels, the power duo of Gremlinz & Jesta have just released a full album through the 'headz, The Lee Garden Historical Preservation Society (it's named for a Chinese restaurant in Toronto, where the pair originally met). As we heard in the first cut tonight, there's some quality breakbeat stuff at lower tempos, but mostly it's drum'n'bass with plenty of jungle love. There's a lovely vocal tune featuring enthusiastic Ukrainian-born d'n'b singer flowanastasia, and among the dark'n'heavy electronics there are also hints at jazz and organic sounds. A great entry into the annals of Metalheadz albums.

Kloke - Digital Tribes [Future Retro]
A Brit based for many years in Melbourne, Kloke (aka Andy Donnelly) has been at the top of the jungle game for some years now. When Tim Reaper toured Oz & NZ last year, the pair spent some good time together - there are a number of collaborative releases from them out there already - and Reaper took home a huge cache of unreleased productions from Donnelly. There was clearly a lot of quality stuff in there, from which 12 tracks have been selected for Kloke's first album, and the first album on Future Retro. To his credit, On Rhythm doesn't get tiring, shifting around from typical amens to percussive breaks and severely chopped and manipulated beats, with basslines to order. Thanks to Tim Reaper's neverending enthusiasm for bringing this collection to the world.

Lakker - Dredger [YUKU/Bandcamp]
Czech label YUKU continues its dedication to dominating the bass & experimental electronic music scene with a new EP from Dublin's finest (via Berlin) Lakker. Gateway goes everywhere, from the techno of their R&S breakthroughs like Mountain Divide through to mad gabber shit, and some equally mad jungle deconstruction.

Tidy Kid - Social Butter (Yürke Deconstructed Dub Remix) [Hauch Records/Bandcamp]
Tidy Kid - Fragment 2 [Tidy Kid Bandcamp]
Tidy Kid - Toy Plane In Ice [Tidy Kid Bandcamp]
Tidy Kid - Flower (Copper Beach Remix) [Hauch Records/Bandcamp]
Way back in 2010 a Brisbane artist called Marly Lüske sent me a demo CD-R of tracks under his moniker Tidy Kid, which combined IDM, folktronica and indietronica influences. Some of those tunes appear on a collection he released in 2019 called selected works 06-10, of which a few copies of the vinyl are still available! It was released with Düsseldorf electronic label Hauch Records, who have now - apropos of what I'm not sure - released 10 Mixes For No Cash (lol), in which 10 of the label's artists remix tracks from that old Tidy Kid collection. It's all excellent, highlighting the melodic and textural quality of the source material, some keeping the glitchy, crunchy style of beats, and some heading in other directions. Yürke take "Social Butter" into almost dubstep territories, nice and dark, while Copper Beach pulls apart the vocal-led "Flower" and turns it into a miny-epic of harmonised vocals, stuttery beats and soundscapes. Lüske has both a new album of lo-fi stuff under his own name, and a new Tidy Kid collection coming.

Shugorei - Ghanima [4000 Records]
Timothy Fairless - Inevitable Drone [4000 Records]
This week, Brisbane label 4000 Records will release a huge compilation of 37 tracks and over 3 hours of music called Solidarity Soundwaves, an anti-war, non-violence-promoting collection to raise funds for Medical Aid for Palestinians (MAP). As Israel's relentless destruction of life and livability in Gaza rolls on, the humanitarian crisis gets worse every day. So put $10 or more aside for this compilation, and I guarantee you'll find some musical revelations in there from up north, like the "inevitable" drone from talented composer & electronic musician Timothy Fairless, or the incredible mix of live drums and electronics from Shugorei, the duo of Japanese percussionist Nozomi Omote and producer Thomas Green.

Mark Van Hoen - Electric Lights [Dell'Orso/Bandcamp]
Although he's put out plenty of music on Bandcamp over the past few years, it's been a while since there was a new Mark Van Hoen album - although The First Cause came out last year under his Locust moniker. In the past he's released ambient, techno, distorted hip-hop beats and IDM with female vocals, jungle and more. Plan For a Miracle is a melancholy, soul-stirring album touched by the tragic death of Van Hoen's wife Osho, who fell ill during the latter parts of the album's recording. Grab this on vinyl before it sells out.

Munma - Midday Shoulder Surfing [Ruptured Records/Bandcamp]
Between 2006 & 2009 Beirut musician Jawad Nawfal released his first three albums as Munma - it's mostly instrumental electronic music, dark, with dynamic beats and only a few news samples, but was recorded as a response to the deadly attacks by Israel that reached far into Lebanon during the 2006 war. These albums were released on Ruptured Records, the label run by Nawfal's brother Ziad, and while Nawfal has been busy with collaborative releases of all sorts , including on his VV-VA imprint. Now Munma returns to his brother's label for Transient Organ, a mostly-instrumental album other than artist/photographer Caroline Tabet's murmered French poetry on two tracks (Tabet also provides the evocative cover art). The music is minimal electronica made mostly on modular synths, with a general air of mystery, of a slightly disturbed quiet - only emphasised by the smudged, half-heard spoken words. Recommended.

Senking - i might be wrong (feat. Bonnie B) [Senking Bandcamp]
I know Jens Massel's music as Senking via his album Capsize Recovery, his fifth on the legendary German minimal electronic label Raster-Noton. So it's interesting to discover that the music on his Bandcamp - one 7" from 2016 and a series of single tracks since 2022 - is a series of very organic-sounding analogue synth jams, very live-sounding even when there are drum machines involved. The latest, "i might be wrong" is a gorgeous further departure, starting with two looped chords perhaps played on a cello or double bass, spacey electric guitar strums and sparse vocals from his mate Bonnie B. It's like a lost Flying Saucer Attack track or something, and I would 100% enjoy an album of this stuff and mysterious analogue bass throbs...

MJ Guider - Primavera (Ritmo Joven) [MJ Guider Bandcamp]
A departure for MJ Guider here too, who eschews her post-industrial shoegaze for freeform sonic constructions that all centre around flute, played and processed in various ways, along with guitarscapes and electronics. It's very unusual and enveloping stuff, recorded in - and steeped in - humid heat.

Listen again — ~208MB

Wednesday, 7th of February, 2024

There's some great string-based music out this week, including indie-rock strings, stringdietronica (I made that up. It's awful, sorry), and some gorgeous double-bass/percussion-ambient stuff from three Aussie women. Also noise and glitch, dubstep/industrial dub, and shoegaze...

LISTEN AGAIN to check that thing you missed the first time. Stream on demand brought to you by our wondrous host FBi, podcast here.

Derek Piotr - East Tennessee feat. Ican Harem [forthcoming, check Derek Piotr Bandcamp]
On May 10th, Derek Piotr's new album Divine Supplication will be released, and tonight we've brought you the first single, "East Tennessee". Derek's music has various tendencies: far-out glitch; vocal avant-gardism and vocal manipulation; recontextualising folk and classical music (he is a folklorist as well as composer and vocalist); and manipulation of field recordings. The new album will be a goldmine of guest collaborations - vocals from brilliant Norwegian singer Maja Ratkje and, on this track, Ican Harem of Gabber Modus Operandi; composition interpolations from My Brightest Diamond and Dirty Projectors; appearances from Fennesz, Brian Chippendale of noise rockers Lightning Bolt; and Piotr makes use of Olivier Alary's processing patches from the fabled first Ensemble album Sketch Proposals. Piotr's music can lean towards arch-postmodernism at times, but this album promises to be emotionally dense along with the referential and technical aspects.

aya - Lip Flip (ft. LOFT) [YCO]
Aya Sinclair has been known as aya now for long enough to drop the "fka LOFT", but I think there's a combination of humour and pointed commentary to the former alias's continual re-references. On the title track of her forthcoming EP Lip Flip, the pseudonym is given a "featuring" credit, perhaps as a farewell, as the EP is aimed at raising funds for Aya's Facial Feminisation Surgery. The music itself is a glitchy piece of 4/4 funk, digi-house with off-beat sprays of synth glitter and occasional vocal snippets.

Patrick Carpenter - The Revenant (Blushing Panda remix) [Patrick Carpenter Bandcamp]
Patrick Carpenter - Lucky 7 [Patrick Carpenter Bandcamp]
Although Patrick Carpenter has been an important figure in the intersection of UK hip-hop, electronic music and jazz for decades, there's been precious little in the way of solo work. He was the "PC" half of PC & Strictly with Strictly Kev aka Kevin Foakes, who as a duo complemented Matt Black and Jonathan More of Coldcut when contractual obligations led them to form DJ Food to experiment in instrumental, sample-based music outside of their usual alias. A few years in, they retrieved control of "Coldcut", and DJ Food was passed on to PC & Strictly, who together authored the incredible Kaleidoscope album in 2000 (augmented with the beautiful Kaleidoscope Companion a few years back). Along the way, PC & Strictly also joined More & Black in what many consider the greatest DJ mix of all time. Meanwhile he was also part of J Swinscoe's Cinematic Orchestra for a number of albums, but for a while now I believe he's been mostly working in an engineering/production capacity. But some creative projects have been happening behind the scenes, so we now have the eight-track Electric Envelope on his *ahem* Minestrone of Sound, in which you can hear the jazz orchestrations and trip-hop bass/beats of those older projects, but also tight & controlled electronic beats. Eight brilliant productions, but importantly eight compositions steeped in humanity.

toechter - Me she said [Morr Music/Bandcamp]
toechter - Mercury [Morr Music/Bandcamp]
So how does a trio of string players end up being released on the Morr Music label? The three members of German trio toechter, Marie-Claire Schlameus, Lisa Marie Vogel, Katrine Grarup Elbo play cello and violin, and classical composition filters through their self-composed works, but they also use their instruments to create percussive sounds and process them in other ways, and the musicians' voices join these acoustic & electronic elements so that what we hear is a seamless blend of songwriting and composition with electronics. In the early days of Utility Fog, Morr Music was home to various Notwist side-projects (Lali Puna, Ms John Soda etc) as well as acts like Styrofoam who feel awkwardly under the umbrella of "indietronica". Here, another generation takes those tropes and somehow reconstructs the sounds purely on strings. It's a thing of beauty.

Gareth Skinner - Sangfroid Aloha [Kasumuen]
Gareth Skinner - Bitching [Kasumuen]
Melbourne cellist Gareth Skinner was an indie rocker in the '90s, playing bass guitar but also quite prominently featuring the cello in the great, wild indie rock band bZARK. I've been a fan of Gareth's solo music too for a long time - songs from 2009's Looking For Vertical still appear unbidden in my head at odd times. So you can guarantee my ears perked up to the news of a new solo album. Off // Axis is out now via Kasumuen - sadly vinyl only (and digital) - and like Gareth's other records, most of the instrumental load is carried by multi-tracked cello. There's drums via Drew Caldwell, who played with Gareth in Disaster Plan and The Ergot Derivative, and a few other guests (including Joel Silbersher of notorious Melbourne punk/rock bands GOD and Hoss), but there are riffs and melodies and unhinged solos on the cello, as well as Gareth's somewhat deadpan vocals. I love it, hope you do too!

Panghalina - Not Super [Room40/Bandcamp]
Panghalina - Whale Dance [Room40/Bandcamp]
Room40 have already started the year strongly, and Lava, from new Australian trio Panghalina is already a highlight. This music is simultaneously abstract and representational - the slow-moving molten rock that is lava flows through the music. Helen Svoboda's double bass serves as the melodic instrument a lot of the time, with gorgeous mournful harmonics floating through the scattered percussion of Bonnie Stewart and Maria Moles. Svoboda's and Stewart's voices also provide eerie melodies, and despite 2/3 of the band being drummers, this isn't rhythmic music at all much of the time (not surprising given Moles' prior solo work!) Really you need to sink into Panghalina's volcano and trust that it stays dormant. Your trust will be richly rewarded.

Tot Onyx - Naked Repugnance [group A Bandcamp]
Way back in 2018, the Berlin-based Japanese techno/noise/experimental duo Group A performed at Dark Mofo and I was blown away by the flow of uncategorisable sound the two women produced - Sayaka Botanic on violin and electronics, Tommi Tokyo on all sorts of other electronics, both also adding their voices to the layered, pulsating madness. The duo haven't seemingly been that active for a while, but Tommi Tokyo introduced her solo act Tot Onyx a couple of years ago, and a slew of releases has followed. The start of 2024 brings her first self-released EP, T.O.1, made up of fragments of live performances over the last year or two, and it brings some of the bewildering energy of that performance in 2018, albeit considerably abstracted from any kind of beats. This is noise as sound-art, from a serious and talented practitioner.

sonaura - Vymazané Scény #1 (by The Owl) [Perceptual Tapes/Bandcamp]
sonaura - Deleted scenes #1 [Perceptual Tapes/Bandcamp]
sonaura - No Way of Telling (Ben Nodes Remix) [Perceptual Tapes/Bandcamp]
Last year, the nipaluna/Hobart label Perceptual Tapes sent me a beautiful album of processed piano by label head Timothy Allan aka Spectrical. The follow-up album Noumena came from UK artist sonaura, and I'm sad I didn't manage to play it at the time, as it's lovely subtly surreal tape and glitch stuff. I played "Deleted scenes #1" tonight along with a couple of pieces from the remix album Sonaura have released, Noumena: Reimaginings, which expands the pallette into stuttering granular processing like that of prolific Czech band The Owl, glitchy beats like those from UK's Ben Nodes, along with more tape manipulation. You can download the album for free, but anything contributed will go to MAP/Medical Aid for Palestinians. It's also nice to pay something for Bandcamp releases because the release will then turn up in your Bandcamp library and will turn up in the timelines & notifications of people you're connected to.

Madobe Rika - Ordinary days SNAFU [Virgin Babylon Records]
Here's another piece of breakcore-J-pop from the mysterious "virtual girl" Madobe Rika. It's perfect Virgin Babylon music really, embodying (or rather... not embodying) Japanese aesthetics of prettiness and harshness in equal amounts, with a little wink of humour throughout.

Match Fixer - Rats [SE:CD]
Match Fixer - See Me [SE:CD]
Naarm/Melbourne musician Andrew Cowie has released music under the name Angel Eyes, but switched to instrumental experimental electronica as Match Fixer some years ago. I was hooked from just about the start, through to an excellent album last year on Melbourne's Nice Music, but it's still great to find him now on the Berlin-based SE:CD, which launched last year with the great exael. Cowie's music bears the influence of IDM and contemporary experimental sounds, but with a sure understanding of techno and bass musics. New EP Done brings him as close to jungle/drum'n'bass as he's been, with an album promised around the corner from the same label. And MAP/Medical Aid for Palestinians will also be the beneficiary of any Bandcamp purchases.

Tawdry Otter - What She Knew [Adrien75 Bandcamp]
Adrien Capozzi is best known as Adrien75 in the IDM world, and as part of various ensembles uner the Carpet Bomb label umbrella - I've said before that I wish the Highways Over Gardens comp was still available to share with you. Maybe I'll bug them about it, but in the meantime, Adrien has continued making weird beats and genre-agnostic stuff under the Adrien75 moniker, and for a little while now also as Tawdry Otter, all-electronic, beat-based releases which I think are probably mostly created on the Koala Sampler mobile app. In any case, it's sample-based and beat-based fun, light of touch and fleet of foot.

Shit & Shine - Joy_14 [OOH-sounds/Bandcamp]
Shit & Shine - Joy_04 [OOH-sounds/Bandcamp]
Craig Clouse has been a lot of things through his career, and Shit & Shine is his vehicle for solo shenanigans. I've always through of it as a noise act, but there are memorable lo-fi loop-disco, heavy dubstep, glitch, hardcore punk and metal forays as well... at the very least. It's also at times been a band (oh, and don't forget the grind/doom of Todd while we're at it!) but my impression that for ages it's been the outlet for anything Clouse solo chooses to do. So we get to Joy of Joys, released by Italian experimental label OOH-sounds. It's actually not out of order to call this noise, among other things. It's definitely experimental music in the real sense of experimentation. Each track is a relatively short vignette made of short blurted samples that only accidentally form any kind of rhythms - and yet vocal stabs and delay effects at times remind one of the in-between bits of some dub techno or industrial record, the sound of a warm-up, a soundcheck. But, you know... in a good way.

Wraz. - Dreadbox [Artikal Music/Bandcamp]
I discovered Québecois dubstep producer Wraz. via UK label Artikal Music about a year ago with the excellent Wraith EP, so it's great to find him back on the label with another winner, Dreadbox: four tracks of heavy bass action, great sense of dynamics and creative beats. For my money one of the essential dubstep artists at the moment.

Cartridge - Dem God [DEEP MEDi/Bandcamp]
You always know you'll get quality from DEEP MEDi, one of the most consistent dubstep labels (of course, given it was founded by Mala). Prolific Manchester producer Cartridge has made a mark on the dubstep scene, with collaborations and a growing amount of mastering work, and the Altitude is a killer debut on DEEP MEDi. "Dem God" keeps the dub in dubstep, as well as the good ol' 'ardcore continuum...

The Bug - Gutted(Human Filth) [Pressure/Bandcamp]
Following 4 filth-ridden EPs last year, The Bug concludes the Machine series with Machine V, five tracks of sludgy industrial dub, as always dubstep-adjacent but in that special way that Kevin Martin has honed over 3+ decades of production. These tracks were debuted at one of The Bug's many appearances with grime legend and recent Grammy winner Flowdan, and one can only imagine the intensity.

jesu - Hard To Reach (2024 Remaster) [jesu Bandcamp]
Of course JK Broadrick is a longtime associate of Mr Martin, and their OG duo Techno Animal is seeing its '90s albums re-released with heavy-as-fuck remasters from Broadrick. But Jesu is a well-loved identity within JKB's massive oeuvre, his visionary take on shoegaze-metal, and home to many blissful searing songs of melancholy. The Hard To Reach EP is not technically new: the two opening tracks appear on Jesu's somewhat legendary split with Japanese emo/screamo band Envy, released in 2008, but they appear here remastered by Broadrick - along with two contemporary unreleased gems and an alternate version of the title track, which we hear tonight in all its 13+-minute glory. A super-punchy drum machine beat, albeit different from the beats he programs for Godflesh, motors through, eventually almost overwhelmed by the layers of reverbed guitars, electronics, and Broadrick's clean vox. Seriously wondrous stuff.

Listen again — ~211MB

Sunday, 28th of January, 2024

Tonight we have catch-ups from 2023 and wonderful new stuff, including previews and early singles, ranging from post-jazz and experimental indie to breakcore and chiptune drill'n'bass.

LISTEN AGAIN for the details you missed the first time. Podcast right here, stream on demand via FBi.

Yirinda - Nyun (Brother) [Chapter Music/Bandcamp]
I was very pleased to get to see the full-band version of Yirinda, the duo of Butchulla songman Fred Leone and double-bassist/composer Samuel Pankhurst at the Woodford Folk Festival over the new year, with an ensemble of strings, horns and keyboards. It's a magical combination of Leone's songlines and Pankhurst's arrangements, creating something that I'm pretty sure has never existed before. In the leadup to their self-titled album's release on Feb 16th, the third single "Nyun" (Brother) has been released, and it's as lush as the predecessors. Much recommended.

The Smile - I Quit [XL Recordings/Bandcamp]
I'm a longtime signed-up Radiohead fan, and so I came to The Smile with open ears, and by and large enjoyed their first album. The addition of Sons of Kemet drummer Tom Skinner is well-chosen, but much of the time his drumming doesn't stand out compared to Thom Yorke and Jonny Greenwood's usual drummer Phil Selway. And is The Smile distinct enough to be a different matter from Radiohead? I'm not sure. It's certainly a lot closer to Radiohead than Thom Yorke's excellent solo work, or Jonny Greenwood's composition work. For the first half of the new album I was struggling to find anything that stood out (even the obvious Robert Wyatt-ism of "Friend of a Friend"), but the last three tracks are excellent. Funnily enough Pitchfork singled out "I Quit" as the only dud on the album, so fuck them. The stuttering guitar and acoustic piano are joined by a programmed bassline, barely-there beats and soaring keyboards and at times discordant strings. Sure, it doesn't have a contrasting rousing chorus, but I'm sorry if you expected standard song structures from these guys...

Astrid Sonne - Say you love me [Escho/Bandcamp]
Astrid Sonne - Do you wanna [Escho/Bandcamp]
The third album from Danish composer Astrid Sonne is perhaps her most "pop" work, complete with her own vocals along with electronics and her trusty viola. A few other musicians join her on a few tracks, but the drums, where they are appear on two tracks, are her own, muscular and steady. So I should note that my choices - one track with drum machine and one with live drums - are slight outliers on an album that's mostly orchestrated with new age synths and acoustic instruments. While her vocals are unassuming and cool, there's power in these songs: "Do you wanna have a baby?", she asks on the second track, but that refrain is sharply reframed with her last words: "I really don’t know". Sonne's strengths as composer & arranger are easily supported by her songwriting talents here.

Marla Hansen - Chains [Karaoke Kalk/Bandcamp]
American violist/violinist Marla Hansen has played with Sufjan Stevens, My Brightest Diamond and others in the indie world over many years, and that hasn't stopped since she's been based in Berlin. In 2007-8 I played her debut EP Wedding Day quite a lot, a collection of indie/folk songs based around her viola and voice. Her last album Dust came out on the Cologne label Karaoke Kalk in 2020, an album of full band and electronics alongside her string arrangements, with musicians sourced from the Berlin scene. Follow-up Salt comes out from the same label in March, produced by Berlin-based English violinist Simon Goff, featuring string and brass arrangements along with electronics. First single "Chains" is just a beautiful song, a yearning melody with electronic pop backing that folds down to simple strings. No doubt we're in for something special when the full album drops.

Elena Setién - Surfacing [Thrill Jockey/Bandcamp]
Elena Setién - Coloured Lizards [Thrill Jockey/Bandcamp]
Basque singer and multi-instrumentalist Elena Setién has recorded three albums now for the legendary Chicago label Thrill Jockey, as well as two earlier solo albums and albums as part of the jazz duo Little Red Suitcase with pianist Johanna Borchert formed when based Copenhagen. Her previous albums mix folk and country with thoughtful arrangements, but Moonlit Reveries finds her back in Spain, and working with (legendary Chicago) drummer Glenn Kotche of Wilco (and so much more). Here her folk tendencies reach to Latin music - "Coloured Lizards" in particular has a samba feel - but also sidle in avant-garde directions. The moonlight here represents motherhood and the feminine, but also the half-seen, disquieting sense of dream states. Put this album on in a quiet room let it gently distort your sense of reality.

Domenico Lancellotti - Um abraço no Faust [Mais Um/Bandcamp]
Domenico Lancellotti - Diga [Mais Um/Bandcamp]
The intentions of Brazilian innovator Domenico Lancellotti's album sramba can be found in the title of the second track, "Um abraço no Faust". A repetitive groove of close Latin harmonies (with a gorgeous major key middle-eight), it's named for João Gilberto's instrumental "Um Abraço no Bonfá", but where Gilberto offered a hug to guitarist Luiz Bonfá, Lancellotti here is hugging the strangest of the key krautrock bands, Faust. Working with Ricardo Dias Gomes, another Brazilian familiar with the classics but very willing to mutate them, Lancellotti takes samba into new directions - "samba de máquina" - but as his clear forefather Tom Zé proved more than four decades ago, samba deconstructed is still samba.

DJ Swagger - Off The Dime [Kommerz Records/Bandcamp]
Lutz Reineke has been releasing music since he was only 18, starting with house and moving through deep house, techno and breaks. But of late (at the ripe old age of 25) he's been making a sharp left turn into neo soul and indie, as will appear on his Chemistry Forever on Kommerz Records in March. Single "Off The Dime" is a smooth r'n'b/soul song that switches gears in the last third into a kind of low-slung digi-hip-hop mode, which reminds me of later Funkstörung. Nicely done.

STATIC CLEANER LOST REWARD - Mirage Game [Low Company]
STATIC CLEANER LOST REWARD - Fair Game [Low Company]
STATIC CLEANER LOST REWARD is one of many aliases of Naarm/Melbourne musician Tarquin Manek - one in fact that was last used (and first used?) 10 years ago for a cassette on Nipaluna/Hobart label Altered States Tapes. Tarquin's a member of noise/weirdo band Bum Creek, was in F ingers among other things with Carla dal Forno, and Kallista Kult with Y L Hooi - many of these also involving Sam Karmel of CS + Kreme. Oh and he played in the band version of Evelyn Ida Morris's Pikelet yo! All of which is to say that Tarquin's underground-Melbourne cred couldn't be more impeccable. Breathing Under Honey is the last release on London's Low Company and it's absolutely a minefield of weird left-turns, while still being some of the most focused work from Tarquin. A kind of dubby post-punk techno thing permeates the productions, with zonked-out vocoded vocals slivering around in the murk. It's rhythmic - except when it isn't - and whatever else it may be, it's never conventional.

LOUFR - dark [Pointless Geometry]
LOUFR - h0pe [Pointless Geometry]
Polish composer Piotr Bednarczyk has recorded a few albums now as LOUFR, inhabiting the space between contemporary classical, post-club and other experimental electronicism, as well as a very leftfield kind of electronic pop. New album FEARS is out this coming week from the adventurous Polish label Pointless Geometry, and you can hear all of that here: seemingly ambient music with sharp glitch interruptions and seemingly acoustic strings; UK bass-influenced beats with vocoded vocals. There is a surprising amount of vocals on this album, but like everything else it's morphed and blended so that all those elements are hard to tease out. And because of that, it's striking when those contrasts do happen - the heavy glitch, the acoustic piano or string instrument, the straight beat. Bednarczyk knows what he's doing and has the skills to make it work beautifully.

cadeu - slow fade [Hyperboloid Music]
Broosnica - Ways Of The Underground [Hyperboloid Music]
From Poland to Latvian label Hyperboloid Music, who released their Hyperboloid 2024 on the 31st of December 2023. Here are experimental electronic artists from all around Europe and beyond, covering plenty of genres but generally dancefloor-worthy. German producer cadeu is a good example, with hyperpop vocal samples and an infectious bass-heavy groove, while from Russia, Broosnica takes things into proper drumn'n'bass territory with a well-used rap sample and breakbeats. Leading us into...

When 2 - Away [Blorpus Editions]
You might know Mike Meegan for his music as RXM Reality, usually released on on-point labels Hausu Mountain or Orange Milk Records. Meegan's music is a hyper-everything stew of metal, pop, rock, whatever, all banged together into shapes resembling IDM, jungle, footwork and techno - and plenty of glitch. So on paper you'd think that his new project When 2 - whose debut album Here is released on Blorpus Editions, run by Max Allison/Muqks, one half of Hausu Mountain - would be just an extension of RXM Reality. Here Meegan is directly inspired by the genius of Carl Stone and his specially-developed Max/MSP patches the let him create skittering glitchscapes. And what we get is indeed like the bastard son of Carl Stone and RXM Reality - hyperspeed granular rides through samples of pop and rock, which I mostly can't identify, stuttering and crashing into kaleidoscope visions of jungle or footwork - see how comfortably "Away" segues out of the drum'n'bass ahead of it. Really this is masterful stuff.

bagel fanclub - smeegle premonition [Maulcat/Bandcamp]
rkgk - train2catch [Retrac Recordings/Bandcamp]
rkgk - you4me [Retrac Recordings/Bandcamp]
apollo bitrate - sequels that nobody asked for [slut punk]
Big thanks to Miles Bowe, whose Acid Test column in Bandcamp Daily introduced me to the music of River Everett and Caybee Calabash, who together make up bagel fanclub. Last year's how are your cars driving? is an intense ride through chiptune breakcore and idm, heavily reminiscent of the Kid606/Datach'i/OVe-NaXx/early VSnares days. Harsh but with heart, seen through a hyperpop-smeared lens, this is fun and cheeky music that sometimes mines beauty from its relentless distorted digital maximalism, and the same goes for their recent separate work. River Everett, based somewhere in the US, makes ultra-lo-fi hypnagogic ambient synth stuff as New Mexican Stargazers, but as rkgk contrasts those tape-distorted longform wanderings with breakneck digital cuts'n'breaks, and like his predecessors from the '90s and '00s imbues every track with genuine melody. I recommend you go4it. The other half of bagel fanclub is Caybee Calabash, across the pond somewhere in the UK, whose many aliases can be found at slutpunk.bandcamp.com. Her music tends towards the noiser end of the breakcore/glitch spectrum, but as amply shown on "sequels that nobody asked for", can pull emotion from the chaos, with lovely harmonic progressions in a slow 3/4 time signature splattered with distorted breaks. World's End Girlfriend eat your heart out. Calabash's despectral maid (as apollo bitrate), and Everett's rkgklp came out this week and last week respectively.

Rutger Zuydervelt - Malheur 7 [Machinefabriek Bandcamp]
Out this coming Friday is the latest all-electronic beats work from Rutger Zuydervelt aka Machinefabriek, which like the last few will be available on a limited 3" CD as well as digital. Malheur has some of his best work yet in this space - informed by decades of refined sound-art, drone, and collaborations across free jazz, modern classical and minimalist postrock. You can feel Zuydervelt's appreciation of drum'n'bass and IDM in these tracks, affectionate tributes to the music of his youth despite their crunchy rhythmic darkness.

Sote - River of Pain [SVBKVLT/Bandcamp]
By now, Ata Ebtekar aka Sote ("Sound" in Farsi) is a firm fixture on this show, going right back to his quasi-breakcore debut EP on Warp, and through his many gorgeous, uncanny explorations of Persian classical & traditional music and Iran's extremely fertile electronic & experimental music scene. His new album Ministry of Tall Tales will be released on the influential Shanghai label SVBKVLT on February 29th, with the beautiful single "River of Pain" available now. It's entirely electronic, but its microtonal motifs evoke traditional Persian music played in a dream-space. Following 2022's Majestic Noises Made In Beautiful Rotten Iran, Ministry of Tall Tales reflects more on the corrupted, oppressive situation in his homeland and its surrounds - made all the more desperate by the governments of "Western" countries.

Nadah El-Shazly - Breakup By The Sea [Asadun Alay Records/Bandcamp]
Now Montréal-based, but a pivotal figure in the Egyptian experimental music scene, Nadah El-Shazly is a composer, multi-instrumentalist and singer: most recently she made a stunning vocal contribution to Algiers' 2023 album Shook, and back in 2019 she joined the Egyptian/Lebanese/Turkish psych-rock/jazz supergroup Karkhana. Out late March is her soundtrack to British-Moroccan director Fyzal Boulifa's film The Damned Don't Cry. El-Shazly's music is heartfelt but uncompromising, using harp, double bass and violin along with her voice and production. We'll hear more from this closer to the release.

Mike Cooper & Pierre Bastien - Tuangku [Keroxen/Bandcamp]
From Keroxen, a sublabel of Discrepant based in Tenerife, in Spain's Canary Islands off the north-west coast of Africa, comes Aquapelagos Vol.2: Índico, the second volume in the label's series reimagining archipelago life with emphasis on the watery surrounds. And who better than the pioneer of watery experimental exotica, Mike Cooper? Here Cooper's processed guitar tones are joined by the distinctive, always bizarre sounds of Pierre Bastien's musical robots and his expressive, eerie trumpet - especially on "Tuangku" where the trumpet is heard in an impossibly low register, sounding out from beneath waves of looped guitar. Incredibly evocative.

Open to the Sea - The Room of the Hungry Blind Sheeps [Matteo Uggeri Bandcamp]
One of the various sound-art and experimental electronic projects of Matteo Uggeri, Open to the Sea initially saw Uggeri join with instrumentalist and sound-artist Enrico Coniglio and a host of guests, making gentle, mostly-instrumental music redolent of folk, postrock, jazz and post-classical: music in the vein of Rachels, Piano Magic, Dakota Suite or Astrïd. Lately they've been joined by Saverio Rossi aka leastupperbound - of course, along with many guests. The beautiful Ten Rooms Under The Sea (fortuitously echoing the previous track's themes) is some of their best work yet, and the drums of frequent Uggeri collaborator Mattia Costa enhance the ambient jazz of two highlight tracks.

BlankFor.ms, Jason Moran, Marcus Gilmore - Little Known [Red Hook Records/Bandcamp]
BlankFor.ms, Jason Moran, Marcus Gilmore - Tape Loop D [Red Hook Records/Bandcamp]
Stepping from Open to the Sea into "real jazz" to conclude tonight's show, we find ourselves nevertheless in a strange liminal world, in which accomplished jazz improvisors Jason Moran (piano) and Marcus Gilmore (drums) are captured in the grainy magnetic spools of BlankFor.ms' tape manipulation. The music on Refract, released on Red Hook Records in September last year, sometimes favours the jazz phrasing of Moran's virtuosic piano lines and its interplay with the nimble, sensitive drumming of Gilmore, but their live playing is always sampled, looped and manipulated by BlankFor.ms. Much of the material seems to rise up out of the abstractions of BlankFor.ms' tape loops, but what's particularly special is the restraint from all three musicians. On the album closer, the anonymously-titled "Tape Loop D", the tape rumble is allowed to spin out for almost half a minute before the delicate piano re-enters. It's a gorgeous moment on an album full of delicious surprises.

Listen again — ~204MB